Riddley Walker

Two thousand years after a nuclear war flattened civilization, England has reverted to a muddy Iron Age, and the survivors live in fenced settlements, telling fractured myths about the "Power Ring" and the "1 Big 1" that destroyed the old world. Riddley Walker is twelve when his father dies in a digging accident, and he leaves his settlement to wander a poisoned country of feral dogs, traveling puppet shows that carry the government's propaganda, and men trying to reconstruct gunpowder from half-understood legends. Hoban narrates the entire book in a phonetic, broken-down English that the reader must decode word by word, building a world where language itself has degraded alongside the civilization that spoke it.