When the Apocalypse occurs, our hero, Ed is in Scotland and must get home to his family in Cornwall. With hell, literally reigning down, he makes his way across the UK by running. This is a hard novel to categorize, part dystopian, part sport/running story. Ed is not an easy character to like, but readers will be cheering him on, hoping that he makes it back to Cornwall and his family

knew as soon as I saw the title of this book that I had to read it and that there was a high chance I would love it. Since finishing it I can say that The End Of The World Running Club is one of my new favourite books.
“Beliefs are strange. Things of certainty about things uncertain. Take mine, for example. I believe there are graves in the field next to the house where I live. I stop at the fence every morning and I look at three lashed crosses standing crooked against the sea, and I believe I know who is buried beneath them.
But I can’t be sure, so I believe instead. I suppose I could dig them up, but as I see it, there are only two ways that little enterprise could end, and neither of them is particularly palatable. Besides, if you have to go around digging up graves to prove your own sanity then you’ve probably lost it.”
After reading these opening paragraphs I knew I was hooked and, with the exception of a family meal yesterday, all my time has been spent reading this book.
The day before the world ended Edgar was nursing a hangover in a soft play children’s area with his wife and two kids. I watched it all and wondered what any man might wonder at any given moment of his life: How the hell did I get here?
Edgar was adrift in his own life. He was overweight, drank too much and exhausted with his day to day life. My job grated my very core. My marriage gave me vertigo. And my kids…Well, I wasn’t the most engaged father.
There were signs for a long time before disaster struck but Edgar like everyone else ignored those signs until it was too late.
The morning it all happened Ed was up early with his son Arthur and noticed a few unusual things like his tv wasn’t working and his phone had no signal. He also had a vaguely remembered sense of dread, a vague memory of the night before when he had been drinking. It wasn’t until he walked to the local shop and saw the newspapers abandoned outside that he remembered what was causing the sense of dread. They told of imminent asteroid strikes the next day and advised people to stay indoors. Ed saw a news report whilst he was drinking that said the same thing but he was too drunk to do anything about it or to remember it the next morning and feels bad because he has lost vital preparation time.
Ed and his family hunker down in their cellar and try to avoid listening to the screams of the dying outside the hatch. They become trapped in the cellar but eventually are rescued and taken to an army barracks.
Ed volunteers to go out on scavenging trips with the soldiers despite being physically unfit, anything to get away from his family and Beth knows that.
“You’d rather be out there than in here. You always have.”
Then Ed becomes separated from his family and realises that he should have been a better father and husband. Something in him changes and he realises he will do anything to get his family back including run across the country to get to them.
Ed is clearly not someone who likes physical exercise but his need to get to his family enables him to overcome his physical and emotional trials along the way.
“It happened because...well, I can’t tell you exactly why it happened. Perhaps it happened only because I let it happen.
I shall say this again. I hated running. I picked my way through the wreckage. Then I began to run.”
SPOILER WARNING
Normally I hate ambiguous endings that leave you questioning what you think you know but I don’t think any other kind of ending would have worked with this book. If the ending was 100% happy then it wouldn’t have fit the rest of the book and if it had been all doom and gloom then I would have felt either depressed or cheated.
I chose to believe the authors ending initially but on re-reading it for review there are certain things that made me think maybe the ending wasn’t as rosy as I first thought. For example, when I was re-reading it for review this paragraph jumped out at me:
“I believe what I believe to make life less terrifying. That’s all beliefs are: stories we tell ourselves to stop being afraid. Beliefs have very little to do with the truth.”

Some Things I Loved About The End Of The World Running Club
The relationship between Bryce and Ed. Despite first impressions they became close friends throughout their journey and helped each other along the way.
The way their journey reminded me of The Walking Dead but without the zombies!
The characters they meet along the way – each one adds to their journey in some way.
Gloria and the other female characters. Some reviews I have seen argued that the female characters are inconsequential in The End Of The World Running Club but I totally disagree. It is his love for Beth and Alice that keep him going. Memories of Alice are particularly strong throughout and it is a toy he made for Alice that gives him motivation during the hard times. Gloria could never be called inconsequential or weak but I don’t want to say anymore at risk of ruining the story. Also, as much as I disliked Jenny Rae she did provide some unique obstacles and was clearly a strong character.

Things I Didn’t Like About The End Of The World Running Club
That it had to end

Poor Edgar, he's not having a great post apocalyptic experience and I loved every minute of his trials and the heroic effort it required to get him back into the arms of his family.

We meet some great characters along the way, some of them were scary, some of them I loved, all were so well written that I could see them in my minds eye and feel what they were feeling. The countryside and the devastation of the event were characters in themselves, and I could easily envision what Edgar was having to live in and live through. The opening chapters were so vivid that months later I am still seeing them and cringing.

I highly recommend this book to lovers of post apocalyptic fiction that is very well written, highly entertaining and will have you so grateful to wake up in your own bed and not in Edgar's world at the end of the book. I loved every page! What a fabulous read.

Edgar Hill is facing the end of the world with his family. When the asteroids hit, he had the good sense to put himself and his wife and kids in the cellar of their home. Not every home around him has a cellar, and not everyone thought to hide there. When the asteroid shower is finally over he finds himself and his family alive but barely surviving. Edgar finds a place where other survivors are gathered with the military that is left in the area. He volunteers to go out to find food and supplies and comes back to find that his family has been rescued by helicopters and taken to the coast. Now Edgar and a group of others who missed the helicopters must travel from Edinburgh to the South of England, roughly 550 miles. Roads are impassible and time is short so they decide to run. They must make it alive before the boats launch and take away his family forever.

This story was such a fast paced read for me. I felt the clock ticking the whole time I was reading this. At first it is just about survival and then it was about Edgar getting to his family safely. The story starts off with a bang as the asteroids are hitting his hometown that morning. The received almost no warning and the panic was something I actually felt for him. Edgar has a wife and two small children. The youngest is still breastfeeding, so it is imperative that he maintain food and keep everyone alive. Edgar isn’t exactly the best man for the job, but he is all they have.

I found Edgar to be a realistic character. He admits that he avoided dealing the chores of rearing children as much as humanly possible. He commends his wife for taking up his slack. He admits to not being a good husband or father. Edgar is overweight and lazy. He fully admits all that and so right away I liked his humility. He is probably the last hero you would expect. I rooted so hard for him even though he probably didn’t deserve to be reunited with the family he took so for granted.

Edgar is surrounded by a unlikely group of people as he travels to the coast. Some of the characters were pretty well flushed out and I had no trouble telling people apart. We not only get a good look at Edgar’s motivation, but we also see the strengths and motivations of some of the people he travels with. I didn’t understand some of the characters motivations, but I am guessing a character like Edgar wouldn’t care either. Also, I didn’t understand his wife, or Edgar’s marriage, at all but I could see that he was really determined to get back to his kids, especially his little girl.

My favorite part about this book is how Edgar comes to terms with running. The author obviously understand what it takes to motivate a body that has been sedate to run and then keep on running.

“Before the first step, before the first muscle twitches, before the first neuron fires, there comes a choice: stand still or move. You choose the right option. Then you repeat that choice one hundred thousand times. You don’t run thirty miles, you run a single step many times over. That’s all running is; that’s all anything is. If there’s somewhere you need to be, somewhere you need to get to, or if you need to change or move away from where or what you are, then that’s all it takes. A hundred thousand simple decisions, each one made correctly. You don’t have to think about the distance or the destination or about how far you’ve come or how far you have to go. You just have to think about what’s in front of you and how you’re going to move it behind you.”

The group faces a lot of danger and encounters some strange groups who all have their own agenda. Between the danger and fatigued described by the author by the runners themselves, I felt so much during this read. Edgar wasn’t the one I would pick to run across the country, but he ends up earning back some dignity as he travels and faces the obstacles. I have to admit that some of this story seemed far fetched, but I enjoyed going along with Edgar as he raced to get to his family.

"Don’t get me wrong— I loved my wife and I loved my kids, but that doesn’t mean to say I had to be happy about it."

Edgar Hill is 35 years old, is married with a toddler and a baby - and to put it plainly, he's not the most involved husband or father. He and his family live in Scotland and he wakes up one morning, bleary eyed and irritable with a hangover, to find that the end of his world as he knows it is imminent. Thousands of meteorites start hitting the Earth, especially the Northern Hemisphere, and he frantically drags his family to their small cellar.

In the aftermath of the profound destruction of the U.K. and a good portion of the world, Edgar gets separated from his family and realizes just how much they mean to him.

No more details of the story except to say that Edgar would probably be pictured in the dictionary under the definition of "couch potato" and there is an abundance of running in the book.

If given a choice of what to read, I will automatically head to the post-apocalyptic section of either a virtual or a stones and mortar bookstore so I had great hopes for this book from the beginning. There was a bit too much of the philosophical in parts of the story whereas I prefer action but it still was a good story.

Edgar is a character that kind of grows on you (thank goodness) because he was a horse's ass towards the beginning of the book. There were some unique, memorable characters that I liked a lot throughout the course of the story - both good guys and bad guys. And author Walker created a world on these pages that I hope we never see.

I received this book from Sourcebooks Landmark through Net Galley in exchange for my unbiased review.

The End of the World Running Club by Adrian Walker is a highly recommended post-apocalyptic thriller.

When an asteroid breaks apart showering meteors, destruction and doom onto Earth, Edgar Hill of Edinburgh, Scotland, must finally confront and face his responsibilities, or lack thereof, as a husband and father. Before the world ended, Edgar was an overweight, lazy, unhappy man, likely an alcoholic, who left most of the responsibilities and sacrifices of parenting young children up to his wife because, well, he was the one who worked. (Yeah, right.) When the world ends he realizes he needs to up his game, but is wholly unprepared to do so - until his wife and children are whisked away in a helicopter and he has to cross 450 miles of unknown chaos to try to reunite with them.

Edgar heads out traveling with a group of men and one soldier, a woman, from Edinburgh to Cornwall in hopes of finding his family and evacuating with them on the boats. The boats are rumored to be taking people from Cornwall and going south, to Australia, maybe, or South Africa, to safety and civilization. Along the way the group encounters violence and chaos. Edgar's endurance is tested once the group realizes that they must head south on foot and that to make it, they must run.

This is really more of an end-of-the-world novel than a running to survive novel. The running club doesn't actually start running until half way through the novel. Before you get to the running though, you see scenarios of how quickly the veneer of civilization falls away and lawlessness, chaos and bedlam take over. It's kind of standard fare for an end of the world novel, though, so it is also expected.

The End of the World Running Club is well written, with plenty of gripping action along with reprehensible scenes and despicable actions. It is an engrossing novel that will hold your attention to the end - as any good apocalyptic novel should. I really liked the novel. The problem is that I never grew to like Edgar. I felt like his family might be better off without him.

I also understand that he was written as a disagreeable character; Edgar tells us all his flaws and his feelings. He whines about his inadequacies as a man, husband, and father. He is expected to miss his family and, suddenly, he does after the world has ended and they have been taken away from him. Sometimes it's easy to say you want something or someone when they aren't there, in all their neediness, clinging, and crying. I get it, the running club is representative of Edgar's evolving and changing into the man he should have been. But... let me just say that the ending was pitch perfect for me.

Disclosure: My review copy was courtesy of the publisher/author.
http://www.shetreadssoftly.com/2017/08/the-end-of-world-running-club.html
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2109966793
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I know lots of people will LOVE this book, and precisely for the reasons I dislike it. DNF because I hated the main character. Pretty much he is described as my ex-husband and whines about how terrible of a guy he was for chapters on end, in between apocalypse bits. I'm glad the guy grows as a person, but there was too much long-winded description for my liking.

I had such a hard time getting into this book. I liked the beginning and the parts that were questioning our society and way of life. But once it finally got to the running part I just felt like it dragged on without anything too exciting. I felt like the story repeated itself and the characters felt a bit too simple and one-dimensional.
Some parts were entertaining, but mostly it wasn't for me.

I did not really like this book. I thought I would love it and I was kind of disappointed. I did not like the main character, Ed, so it made it hard to like the whole book. Also it was long and complicated, plot-wise. It was quickly paced and I did like the writing. I think the actual hero of the book is the Ed's wife. She didnt complain and whine about everything. She just did what she had to do. Just not for me.

This was a surprisingly great read. At times, I found myself wanting to rush the protagonist along, but otherwise the story kept my attention. I will recommend this book to my book club.

Didn't care for this book, it might have been because the main character was just too whiney and unlikeable. A quick read nonetheless but most of the characters were not terribly interesting except for maybe Edgar's wife. Nowadays a dystopian story must really standout and this one just doesn't.

Described as a post-apocalyptic thriller, I was surprised to be pulled into the fast paced (no pun intended - I know that is was partially about long distance running) story. What would normal people do to survive and how would they do it? When the world ends - mostly - Edgar and his family are just trying to survive, circumstances separate Edgar from his wife and children and majority of the story is the extreme lengths he goes though in order to get back with them. The minor characters that enter and exit the storyline are well thought out and full of the variety of what I imagine would be reality for this time. After reading this I have no desire to become a long distance runner - it was explained way to well for me to ever get off my treadmill. The author did a great job of keeping the people and the reactions realistic. I had a hard time putting it down for minor things like eating and sleeping.

I really didn’t expect to like The End of the World Running Club at all, let alone enjoy it as much as I did. I thought I was in for another cliched post-apocalyptic story about a man fighting for survival in a strange world. Which, in a way, I was. But luckily for me, the book was so much better than that.

The end of the world has come: asteroids have hit the earth, decimating most of England, and destroying Edinburgh, where Ed lives with his wife and children. By chance, Ed realises that something bad is going to happen just in time and manages to get his family into a cellar where they can ride out the worst of the storm. A few chapters later and Ed has ended up stranded in Edinburgh, while his family are now on the other side of the country – and he’s got a month to get to them. Duh duh duh!

Let me just say it: the premise is good but nothing spectacular. Man must travel to rescue wife. I mean, we’ve definitely seen this before. And Ed himself is actually quite an annoying character. He’s overweight, lazy, disengaged and cares more about making himself happy than actually being with his family. He’s also incredibly cynical and pessimistic, which can drag at times. So I definitely (and maybe it’s because I’ve met Ed’s before in my life…) wasn’t a fan.

But there was still something really engaging about his story. I think this was mostly because Walker has portrayed, in real detail, exactly – and I do mean exactly – how I would imagine the average Joe reacting to the end of the world. Of course you’d be cynical! Of course you’d be pessimistic! Of course you’d still have a little bit of hope! This was the real winner for me and what kept me turning page after page: seeing how Ed, and the other characters, respond to what has happened, and how it changes them in the process.

The book is also paced well, with dialogue, introspection and action spaced nicely to create a great, rumbling rhythm to the plot, and I do love the conceit of running across England – and thought those parts managed to balance fantasy and reality quite nicely. While I didn’t really believe that was all the characters would have suffered (in terms of pure muscle ache) over the course of the run, I understood why Walker may have smoothed things out.

There’s humour and some very nice one liners and the other characters were definitely more likeable than Ed himself – Grimes and Harvey were standouts in particular, and I thought Bryce was oddly endearing and would have liked to hear more of his backstory as the book went on.

So despite a really, really whiny, irritating main character and a few stumbles when it came to believability, a good solid four in my book.

I really tried to like this book, but I just never really got into it. It became more of a chore to finish it than anything enjoyable. I felt that the characters were very shallow, and half the time, I couldn't remember which one was which because I never really connected with them. There was one woman in the group, and I feel that she was placed there just for the tension it could cause between the other men. I also felt that it dragged. The story probably could have been cut by a third and you wouldn't have lost anything. The book just never seemed to go anywhere for me.

This novel was first released in the UK in 2015, and will soon also be released in the US, by Sourcebooks Landmark, on September 5, 2017. I received a kindle format version at no cost, in return for publishing an honest review. Adrian Walker is a relatively new writer, and I have not read anything by him before.
The post-apocalyptic trek has become a seriously overworked plot. The nature of the apocalypse seems to follow trends. After-the-bomb stories of the 1950s and 60s, a spate of asteroid impacts of the 1980s and 90s, and more recently plague survival stories. The concept alone, just does not pass muster. I’m looking for something beyond blown up landscapes and encounters with crazed survivors. For example, Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven has literary nuances, and Meg Elison’s The Book of the Unnamed Midwife has some world-building with regard to gender. I think Adrian Walker also senses the overuse of the idea, and does not expend many words on the how and why of this particular apocalypse. One day it just happens. Apparently, a fragmented asteroid strike was in the news for the past year, but almost everyone, especially the first-person narrator, totally ignored it and didn’t know what was happening.

The one area where The End of the World Running Club strives for differentiation is in character development, and there it partially succeeds. The first-person narrator is a middle-class overweight uninvolved husband and father, who was actually hung over when ‘it’ happened. I felt his attitudes were too exaggerated and his life too dislikeable for me to accept him as a flawed but sympathetic man. Combined with the ambiguity of the apocalypse, the novel was off to a very amateurish start. But once the five characters who are bound together actually commence their trek, they do get more interesting. Each of them is more than they first appear, and all are changed by their experiences – especially the narrator. The zen of running is overplayed, and some of the dialog is platitudinal. But by then end, I was fully engaged, and truly affected by what happened to each of them.

I found the novel entertaining, but not great. Adrian Walker has potential, if he can turn up the world-building, and turn down the melodrama. The same impact could have been had with less severe character trajectories.

I really enjoyed this book and how it was structured. A refreshing take on how the end of the world might look; no zombies or wandering murderous plants here just the pure determination of a man searching for his family in a post apocalyptic world.

I thoroughly love post-apocalyptic novels but just could not get into this one, after trying 2x and getting to 20% completion - too many unrealistic plot devices for me and a main character that I just could not buy into - my apologies.

I was introduced to this story in Buzz Books and immediately added it to my TBR list. I was fortunate to receive an ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
The title alone was enough to pique my interest and after reading the Buzz Book excerpt, I knew I would have to find out what could make Ed, the main character, “run”. As it turned out, he wasn’t what I would call a likeable sort of guy and definitely not a runner. If he was my neighbor, pre-catastrophic event, we might have waved or nodded if we were headed to work at the same time, but his long days would end with his mates at the bar and I would be at home enjoying time with my family. Ed had chosen a life with a wife, children, a home, and an office job. As he grew older, he saw only how his choices had limited him; a boring, dead-end job, the needs of his children and his wife and as his discontent increased, so did his alcohol consumption, fast food habit and his waistline.
Ed is at home watching the news when there is an announcement that there will be an imminent, devastating asteroid strike and while he should be gathering his family, necessary supplies and seeking shelter, his brain, numbed by alcohol, sends him to bed. When he wakes up hungover, he doesn’t remember the news bulletin and scrambles badly in an attempt to save his family. The story then revolves around his attempts to become a better man, a better father and a better husband. Old habits die hard though, and Ed stumbles and falls, but eventually keeps on running. He is separated from his family and his only chance to be reunited lies in his ability to leave the man he had become behind and move forward, one often painful step at a time.
While the end of civilization is central to the story, so much centers around Ed and whether or not he can move beyond his shortcomings and embrace an uncertain future as a better man. As in any end of the world story, the threats don’t just come from lack of food, water, shelter, electricity and all the creature comforts we have come to rely on, but also from other survivors. Ed has some good people who set out on the journey with him, however, many of the people they encounter have their own agendas that constantly thwart Ed’s efforts to get to his family. While I stated that I did not really like Ed at the beginning, as the story progressed, I sympathized with how he had fallen into despair in his old life, as it can become challenging for many people to really see what they have right in front of them and focus on the bigger picture. This story stripped away almost all of Ed’s old, seemingly insurmountable complaints and made him focus on what he could control, his body and his mind.
I have read many of the reviews that focused on plot holes and inconsistencies and for me at least, I could probably poke holes in almost every book I have read. What I look for is a story that keeps my interest and makes me wish that I could write something nearly as good. Wanting to race to the finish while being sorry that the end is near, that to me has been a good read and one I would recommend to others. Thank you Adrian J. Walker for such an enjoyable read, the publisher, Sourcebooks landmark, and again NetGalley who I will be forever grateful to for introducing me to Buzz Books and this ARC copy.

Brilliant. This book stands out as the plot is brilliant and the way it is written pulls everything together in a wonderful way. The descriptions are so good I could imagine myself there. I loved the sense of humour in this book. I laughed and cried my way through this book. I read this book when it first came out and loved it. I have read a lot of books since then. This one stands out. I loved it just as much the second time. This is a hugely entertaining and enjoyable book which is well worth reading.