After the Outbreak was a great, long runtime audiobook on a non-zombie plague apocalypse centering on a group of (mostly) unrelated good people who come together to form a new family in the post plague world. The book to me falls into a rarer category of global plague apocalypse novels with no zombies, no conspiracies. In this tale, the plague globally kills 96% of the world population, decimating all infrastructure, law and order, in a matter of days.

The story begins with the individual character’s stories, from all different walks of life, covering the fall, and their actions around the collapse, and their journeys to eventually coming together as a group some much later in the story than others). Once the main characters are together, the book mainly deals with getting set up for survival long term, and dealing with threats and danger as they arise.

The story never gets too dark or depressing, and is overall to me a feel good Apocalypse tale where you see good people surviving, behaving honorably, and overcoming bad people when they faced them. The story ends on a positive note, and feels complete, although I would be interested in reading more.

I received this audiobook as a review copy in exchange for an honest review, and am glad for the opportunity. The plague genre is a favorite of mine, going back to The Stand. It unfortunately is a subgenre not covered and covered well as much as other apocalyptic tales, so it is always a pleasure to find a good one like this.

The narration is very easy to listen to, fitting to the material, a good pace, and does an admiral job at distinguishing different characters. I do have a few other audiobooks with this narrator, and would definitely add more to my. I’d definitely get more from the author, but I’ll need to wait for them to be published!