Riddley Walker

Riddley Walker is a post-apocalyptic novel by Russell Hoban, an American-born writer who lived in England. It takes place in Kent, centuries after a nuclear catastrophe has wiped out the old world. Society has fallen back into a harsh, scavenging existence, and the stories and half-remembered fragments of the lost civilisation have turned into myth and ritual.

The narrator is Riddley, a boy of twelve who tells his own story. The whole book is written in a degenerated, broken form of English that Hoban invented, with words worn down and reshaped over the generations. Readers have to decipher the language as they go, and working out its meaning is part of how they find their way through the story.