By Darren Gilbert

In fact, nothing prepares you better for the conditions than the opening scene: an old man is riding a rusted exercise bike in the cellar below his shack, in an effort to charge an eighteen-volt car battery that will provide him with 40 minutes’ worth of electricity. Outside lies death, disease, and desolation.

It’s certainly a grim setting for this high-concept post-apocalyptic debut novel by South African authors Diane Awerbuck and Alex Latimer, collectively known as Frank Owen. But it packs one hell of a punch.

While the old man sets the tone for South, this is a tale about the Jackson brothers, Garrett and Dyce, and their fight for survival against both man and nature. You see, they are fleeing from the Callahans, a family of ruthless law-enforcers who have accused the brothers of killing their only daughter, Bethie. Meanwhile, a consequence of the North winning the war 30 years previously (through biological warfare), is that every puff of wind still brings with it a potentially deadly virus.

The only solution, according to Garrett, is to travel to the coast, find a boat and sail across the ocean — away from everything and everyone. It’s too bad the moisture in the sea air makes it doubly deadly, so there is a flaw in his plan. However, the brothers don’t have a choice. Stay put and the Callahans will kill them. And so, they head south.

Along the way, the duo come across Vida Washington, who is on her own secret mission. Her mother is sick and she is in search for a cure that doesn’t exist. After infecting Dyce by letting him unknowingly drink from a glass used by her sick mother, she decides to join them to keep an eye on him.

At 61 chapters and 407 pages long, South appears a dense read. However, delve a little deeper and you’ll find chapters that are relatively short, allowing the story to move at a swift pace. You can’t necessarily read it in one sitting, but sit down for half an hour and you will find yourself a good 10 chapters in and struggling to put it down.

In between South’s gut-punching action and sense of impending doom, sit numerous lyrical gems that will satisfy any literary fiction fan. This is a brutal and bloody world, but it’s so well written that you see yourself walking beside the characters and wishing they were your friends.

And don’t concern yourself with the fact that it’s set in America – Awerbuck and Latimer use it more for the fact that the USA is a universal setting. There is a healthy dose of local flavour intertwined within the story as Vida’s mother is from the country, while she herself references it a number of times.

While South is about survival in the end times, Owen’s novel offers so much more. It’s about finding hope and unexpected love in a world where everything has been stripped away.

South is a cross between Justin Cronin’s The Passage and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Or as author Sarah Lotz so deftly puts it in a review, a meeting between Patrick De Witt’s The Sister Brothers and Stephen King’s The Stand. A most welcome addition to the genre that deserves to be read; and reread.

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