A huge, huge vote here for Warday, which I think is the best-researched and most realistic book of its sort. Utterly fascinating.
I loved this series, except for the last volume, which seemed like it really needed two volumes to wrap everything up, but they crammed it into one novel to make it ten volumes. At any rate, I thought that this would be some guy’s fantasy of being The Last Man On Earth, but it’s really very well done. All mammals with a Y chromosome drop dead, except for one man and his male monkey. The series explores the way that women adjust to the new circumstances, and I found it to be quite believable.
I thought Carolyn See’s *Golden Days *was pretty good when I read it many moons ago. It’s a novel about a family (a divorced mother, IIRC) coping with the aftermath of nuclear war–trying to get food, dealing with her teenage daughter growing up in a post-apocalyptic California, etc. The professional reviews seem pretty positive, but the user reviews on Amazon.com are a bit on the mixed side.
Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler. The only quasi-mystical element is that the narrator / protagonist is supposed to be an empath, but it’s given a very down-to-earth explanation. (She has a neurological disorder that causes her to feel pain she observes in other people. Therefore, if she sees someone get punched in the face, her nervous system registers it as if she herself got punched, and she feels the pain.) Other than that, it’s starkly rooted in the real world.
Have you ever watched the Mad Max movies? I loved all of them. I just finished reading “Lucifers Hammer” and highly recomend it. Very well written and not to long. I’m not sure if Stephen King’s the “the Cell” would fall under the category you listed, might be something for you to look into. Earth Abides was another great book.
OOOh almost forgot, another movie to check out is called “A Boy and his Dog” Sounds stupid but was a really cool movie.
Is there a name for a flavor of post-apocalyptic fiction that takes place in the far future after the apocalypse? I’ve always enjoyed those stories of finding treasure troves of long forgotten technology and the hints of the back story that no one really knows anymore.
The world in the Gunslinger stories is one such thing setting, and there’s a perfectly awful series called Spiderworld that also has this element.
“Davy” by Pangborn.
Terry Brooks’ Shannara books also take place in the far future after a global apocalypse, though those are fantasy novels.
Just out last week: The Passage. Reviewers have compared it to The Stand. It has vampires, so I don’t know if it meets your requirements. I’m about 100 pages in, and I like it so far.
I liked it as well.
[spoiler] The doctor using hypnosis instead of anesthesia was crazy to me, until I found out in some cases it actually does work.
I also found the crab cove to be a bit too ‘cozy catastrophe.’ [/spoiler]
Sounds a lot like Testament
I wouldn’t call it weak. It could have been more satisfying, but that depends on how much you bought into the protagonist mission. I thought the story behind the mission was the more compelling one, so I thought the ending was realistic.
I’ll provide a quick summary. About 1200 years after our civilization died off, several nation-states have arisen in what used to be the US, and Canada. The protagonist is an historian/cleric/nobleman trying to complete the work of a predecessor who is searching for a hidden cache of books from our civilization
I was going to suggest this. The OP asks for stories of rebirth, though. I’m not sure a story where everybody dies from radiation poisoning, or commits suicide, matches the criteria.
Multi-quote isn’t working for me (or I don’t know how to use it) but this refers to *Earth Abides. * This book should be required reading for everyone. Although some of it is outdated now, it would be interesting to discuss the changes required to bring it up to date. I re-read it every once in a while.
Re-Birth,, originally titled in the UK The Chrysalids, by John Wyndham, describes an interesting post-apocalyptic future society in Labrador dealing with the after-effects of an atomic war, particularly radiation-produced mutations. Although the story involves telepathy, for the most part it’s realistic.
I wouldn’t recommend The Cell to anyone except die-hard Stephen King fans or die-hard Post-Apocalyptic fiction fans (I’m both, actually, and I didn’t enjoy it all that much - it was just missing something, like it was thrown-together or something. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t very good.)
There was a short story or novella in Analog in the 80s about a young girl who survives an apocalyptic plague due to being one of a group sharing a specific mutation. Other than being able to survive the plague, they were of above average intelligence. She was moving across country trying to find others, but all the ones she knew about (she called anyone aware of the mutation an Alpha, and those who had it but did not know a Beta). The story was good on describing what a world would look like if everyone died pretty quickly. It felt like it was part of a series or longer novel, but I never saw anything else. She had a pet parrot, if that helps anyone identify it.
See post #28. 
Emergence by David Palmer, the bird’s name is Terry, and he’s a Hyacinthine macaw.
What you are looking for is the BBC drama “Survivors”, a remake of the 1970’s series of the same name.
Virus kills off most of the population, the few survivors start acting medieval about it all, woman looks for his possibly still alive son with a bunch of multi-ethnic brits and a pissed-off manc… You know the drill.
Wolf and Iron by Gordon R. Dickson
Review of the story here.
http://www.sffworld.com/book/4608.html