4.5/5⭐️
I LOVE the cover. This was the saddest, horrifyingly heartbreaking zombie story. And I loved it. After a breakout of a zombie virus, Kesta’s is workin towards finding answers and hopefully a cure. Her grief is very heavy and so is her love for her husband. The book is kinda slow paced but I felt it helped build the suspense. I loved the details you get as Kesta works out what is happening with the virus. kesta’s actions are questionable and you feel how she tears herself down to do whatever it takes to save her husband. I am definitely adding this book to my fave list.

**Thank you to NetGalley and Gallery Books for the eARC of this unique title!!**

I absolutely loved this twist on the classic zombie tale. I ended up listening to this on audio thanks to Simon Audio and crushed through the audio.

This is a quick one with lots of interesting info throw at the reader throughout. I will definitely recommend this one to my followers!!

One Yellow Eye is a slow slow burn but it was so worth it. I almost didn't finish because at times the book felt tedious but I am so glad I did. This story caught my eye because I love zombie stories but that was really only a background in this book. This was really a meditation on grief, loneliness and what you would do for the ones you love. Kesta was an unlikable character, she was flawed but I felt I could really understand and empathize with her. I don't know what I would have done in her situation but I felt the lengths she would go to to save Tim were so emotional and raw. I loved this book but be prepared to feel every emotion right along with Kesta.

Who knew that a zombie story could be so beautiful? Kesta would do anything to save her husband, Tim, who’s been infected with the virus. She’s a scientist willing to go to extremes in order to get him back. When she’s brought on to a program that’s supposed to find the cure, she works herself ragged to find an antidote. Along the way, there’s a lot of issues that come up to get in her way. From a nosey reporter, to the loud noises Tim makes in her apartment when she’s away, she’s running out of time. How far is Kesta willing to go to save her husband? What will her efforts resort to? And is it enough to save her husband from the virus?

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for allowing me this free ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Well, I was honestly disappointed with this one. The premise was really intriguing and I was hoping for a lot of charged emotions and twists but... I didn't really feel much of anything reading this. It was a little boring for me, taxing to read through, and a bit of a drag when I realized it was not going to pick up. Disappointed is definitely the word that I would use, and I think other two or three star reviews mimic some of the same things I felt while reading through.

Our main character didn't really have much personality and her one defining character trait was simply her obsession with her husband. It just didn't work for me. None of the other characters in the book were set up to be likeable and often annoyed our main character. Then there is tim, which we are supposed to care about, but we don't. Because the situation is messed up, and because he's not a real person. I kept wondering if the FMC was going to tip over into psychotic territory or not. I think, thankfully, this is not one of those stories.

The book was written well enough in terms of start, middle, climax, end, language/grammar, etc. It wasn't cringy or illogical. In fact, it was almost "too logical". The medical happenings in the FMCs day to day were part of what made it drag. I just didn't care enough about any of the characters to care about the why behind what might be happening. But as a novel with structure, it was perfectly fine. That deserves at least a star in my book.

And, I can't help but feel like this was a passion project. Specifically the quote at the beginning of the book, and the dedication, which immediately prompted more emotion for me than I felt in the entire book. I just wish I also felt the passion that the author was feeling when she wrote this.

In all, I wasn't sure what to rate this one. But I think simply because I was pretty bored and looking forward to reaching the end of it throughout reading this, I am ultimately going to give it two stars. I think this book could be a solid four-star read for a specific person, maybe for someone who hasn't experienced or does not want to experience some really emotionally charged zombie media. Or, somebody who has lost a spouse to a just out of reach & almost curable disease. But that, is not me. I'm sad about it, I really wanted to like it. We just never clicked.

When an epidemic that turns its victims into zombies out of science fiction rips through London, the city – even the world – is caught unprepared. The United Kingdom immediately goes into a lockdown eerily familiar to modern readers, as the government seeks to contain and eradicate the threat.

Weeks pass and everything is slowly coming back to normal, as the zombies are gradually hunted down and destroyed. Biologist Kesta Shelley and her husband Tim are among the Londoners cautiously coming out of quarantine, when the unimaginable happens and Tim is bitten.

Refusing to kill him – the only known way to stop the contagion – Kesta locks him in their apartment instead. Now she spends her days working at her research lab, and her nights and evenings caring for what’s left of her deteriorating husband. She puts her clinician’s mind to bear on his condition, even as she hopes to be recruited to the government’s efforts to find a cure. Her dark sense of humor sustains her through an increasingly grim time:

QUOTE
She knew that evidence of change in these things was not necessarily evidence of improvement, but she tried not to let any decline in her patient cause her undue concern. Change meant that Tim was still alive, sort of, and that was all she really cared about. She knew she couldn’t cure Tim on her own. She wasn’t completely delusional. Her plan, if you could call it that, was to preserve her husband in the best kind of undead state possible, until Project Dawn called to accept her, until someone there found a cure. She’d obviously have to figure out how to break the news to her new colleagues about the zombie she had withheld from the authorities for months, itself a criminal act, but this was a problem for a future version of Kesta.
END QUOTE

As time wears on, Kesta finds herself more and more desperate: to steal medical supplies to continue her husband’s care, to keep him safe and quiet as the sedatives begin to lose their effectiveness, to convince her friends and colleagues that she’s just fine, really, only still grieving like any other widow would over her supposedly dead husband. But what lengths is she willing to go to in order to find a cure? What – or even who – is she willing to sacrifice to bring her husband back from the undead?

This thoughtful examination of grief begins with a speculative twist that sometimes feels a little too close to reality. It helps that the zombie outbreak is never played as a supernatural horror trope but is, instead, carefully rooted in modern science. Science, in fact, plays as large a role in this book as it does in Kesta’s life. Before the outbreak, she had two loves: her husband and scientific research. With her husband no longer able to provide her with comfort, she turns to science for solace, performing biopsies on infected samples in her search for answers:

QUOTE
“It’s like a cookie cutter,” she’d once said to Tim, “except the dough is a person.”

She would extract several cylinders to give herself choices later on, secreting them away in specialist cassettes. She would need to fix these samples in a chemical solution to preserve and harden them, allowing her to revisit them indefinitely, cut into them farther if she needed to. She must work with precision. A delicate touch now would be repaid down the microscope later on. Kesta loved histology, the microscopic study of biological tissue and its partner, histopathology, the detective on the look-out for diseased tissue. The identification of the suspect, in this case, abnormalities in the tissue caused by or resulting from infection by the virus. Kesta was searching for biological clues.
END QUOTE

The science of the book is both fascinating and convincing, and provides an orderly counterpoint to the messiness of Kesta’s emotions. There’s no denying that she cares deeply for her husband, against all sense and logic. If you’ve ever known someone who’s been crazed with grief, then Kesta’s seemingly erratic and almost entirely criminal choices and actions will seem familiar, if not outright understandable, as she searches for a cure that she knows full well she may never find.

Love and grief.
A pandemic.
All the zombies were thought to be destroyed...

Is letting go the kindest thing we can do if there is no cure?
Would it be wrong to not tell your circle that your husband is chained to the radiator-- because despite the fact that he is an incurable zombie, you believe you can fix things. You can help him. You're a doctor, afterall, and you've been stealing supplies from the hospital. So you've hidden him. You've told no one-- threatening yourself and the other survivors.

I usually don't love the zombie stuff-- but this one had...heart! It was moving. It won't answer the moral questions, but you will wonder how far Kesta will go, even as madness creeps in, to salvage what's left of her husband, Tim.
I liked that this story was more about love and devotion than BRAINS NOM NOM.
This one takes you through the science behind a pandemic and tests how much your heart can take.

A (very) slow-burn, fresh, realistic spin on zombies.

One Yellow Eye by Leigh Radford was being captivating.
This book had me hooked from the start and I could not put it down. The story is so fascinating and engaging from the beginning to the end.

Dark and haunting and often gruesome—yet movingly dramatic, too—One Yellow Eye is an entirely captivating tale of the power of love to push us to fight through the most challenging of times. It’s the kind of story that will grab you from the start and refuse to let go.

Full review published on NightsAndWeekends.com and aired on Shelf Discovery.

We can call One Yellow Eye a zombie story, sure. But it's really a grief story, at its heart. Anyone who has lost someone to a long illness can see the mirrors in this story, how the grief process unfurls, and how brutal it is. On a personal note, my mother lives this every day, and to see Kesta's pain mirrored in hers was, quite frankly, brutal. But it was also incredibly honest, and I plan to get this book for my mother in the hopes that it may also be cathartic.

This isn't the world-ending apocalypse of The Walking Dead, as this one has seemingly been contained to the greater London area. But as any pandemic, its effects were devastating, and Kesta's husband Tim was among its victims. Only, when the order came to euthanize all zombified persons, Kesta decided to hide Tim in their apartment instead, in an attempt to use her medical expertise to find a cure. Only there is so much that no one knows about the virus and its pathology, so Kesta has a long road ahead of her. She's dealing with this awful grief-limbo situation, and she cannot tell even her nearest and dearest that Tim is quasi-alive, complicating the process.

I was also really invested in finding out the origins of this virus, and how it got to the point where human zombies were a thing. It was so fascinating, especially once we started to get some answers. So not only was I very much here for Kesta's story, I was eager to find out all the things about zombies, too!

Bottom Line: Zombies, but make 'em feel really plausible. But also, grief is hell.

I featured One Yellow Eye in my July 2025 new releases video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5JWYTfUVq4, and though I have not read it yet, I am so excited to and expect 5 stars! I will update here when I post a follow up review or vlog.

A mark of true love- saving your zombie husband and devoting yourself to cure! But in all honesty the writing was beautiful and relatable; I too would do what the main character did. I had so much empathy for a zombie book!

Fascinating twist on a zombie novel. Way more emotional than I expected it to be, and I really cared about these characters. The ending got me in the feels. Great storytelling.

Leigh Radford’s “One Yellow Eye,” is a hushed, aching, post-post apocalyptic story of grief, love, and the lengths we are willing to go to to keep that love alive. In many ways we’re having an era of maximalist horror, and I’m having a great time, I mean look at Chuck Tingle’s brand. “One Yellow Eye,” though defies that trend. It’s a stunning, slow-burn, and whilst it does deal with a pandemic, it tackles it in a deeply personal, raw and micro way. It’s not about saving the world, but a tiny piece of it… and I adored it. It does share a similarity with Tingle’s work though, in that both go to show that love is real and horror is never really heartless. The late Mason Coile (Andrew Pyper) blurbed this book, and said “You wouldn’t expect a zombie novel to have so much to say about love,” and frankly there is nothing I could tell you that sums up this book quite as perfectly as that does. Should the stars align, and I post this when I’m supposed to, this book releases tomorrow in the US: July 15th, from Gallery Books in the US and Tor Nightfire in the UK. My interview with Leigh should also be dropping tomorrow. I’m typing this April 22nd, a few weeks before we’re due to record, but I’m already predicting that it will be an excellent conversation, and I will be fan-girling hard. (Editors note (it’s me, I’m the editor): it was and and I was).

We follow Kesta Shelley, who along with the rest of London is recovering from a zombie pandemic. Zombie Apocalypse Recovery Groups (ZARGs) have cropped up, and terms like BTZ (before the zombies) have surfaced. As a doctor, Kesta wants nothing more than to get involved in the elusive “Project Dawn.” To the best of the rest of the world’s knowledge, there are no remaining cases, after all the infected were shot dead, but there’s no cure either. Kesta is particularly eager to contribute to this effort. It’s partly because she’s fed up of hiding her secret from her friends and neighbours, partly because she no longer wants to smuggle drugs from the hospital she works at back to her apartment, but mainly because her undead husband Tim is chained to her radiator, and she’s determined to bring him back.

The Covid-19 pandemic was such a strange time for me, and considering that 4 years on, my sense of smell is still AWOL, and my taste continues to function at about 60%, I truly don’t believe that really, society is over it yet. I know I’m not. We’ve just closed the tab. Collectively minimised it. The zombie virus that sweeps London in “One Yellow Eye,” is fiction and functionally different in a dozen ways- it would be amiss of me to drone on and on about Covid, but intentional or not, Radford brought a whole host of repressed lockdown memories and emotions bubbling to the surface. Tears were shed. Kesta, for all of her steely pragmatism, is as guilty of this repression as we are, attempting to pretend that her married life has not been completely dismantled and (only partially) reconstructed by the virus. Whilst trying to celebrate birthdays and anniversaries, she actually makes things a whole lot more painful for herself. It’s a performance, a pantomime, and in pretending nothing has changed, she underscores how everything has. It highlights how we shouldn’t fast-forward grief. It wasn’t just that our routines were rattled… our entire lives were put on hold. Trying to return to normality, without acknowledging that shift (which, from my perspective, is what we’ve done) isn’t healing but erasure. Of course this applies to all grief, not just the loss of my sense of smell. Please talk.

Infinitely more than it’s about the pandemic though, this book is about love. Messy, desperate and feral love. Many of the ZARG members in order to protect themselves and end the suffering and torment of their infected loved ones, killed them. It’s an impossible choice. It sounds brutal and it is brutal. When viewed through the lens of mercy, of dignity, of real compassion however, maybe it’s not so unthinkable after all. In many ways, for me, this book delicately brushes against various current ethical issues, such as euthenasia and autonomy. Is there such a thing as being cruel to be kind? Is there a point where love becomes letting go? Kesta goes to extreme lengths to preserve what is left of Tim. Her love for him is unshakable, irrational, and sacred. It’s indisputably, undeniably a form of love. Frankly I can’t say with any conviction that I wouldn’t hold on to the people I love with the same ferocity. If they were there, even half there, hey I might be tempted to chain them to a radiator too. Radford never explicitly moralises, simply leaves us to grapple with our own questions. When is holding on an act of cruelty rather than devotion? Who gets to decide that? There are no easy answers, simply a pulse, and somebody trying to keep it alive.

Words feel pitifully small compared to how “One Yellow Eye,” made me feel. How terrible and terrified I felt for Kesta and that horrible ethical, liminal space between holding on and letting go she found herself caught in. It truly is one of the most effective and affecting things I’ve read in years. It’s an important piece of contemporary horror, and I feel the need to reiterate once, and a thousand times more, that it is heartful. It’s beautiful and brutal in the same breath. It speaks to ethics, to grief, to devotion, to the quiet madness of carrying on when the world beneath your feet has shifted seismically. It touches on things that I couldn’t fit into this review, and things I wouldn’t dare to, for Leigh Radford, this book, and what it is trying to say, deserve far more than my paraphrasing. I don’t take this lightly dear reader- if you take one single recommendation from me this year, let it be “One Yellow Eye.”

***ARC received from Gallery Books and NetGalley, opinions are all my own. Thank you!***

One Yellow Eye is a zombie story, to an extent. There isn’t much zombie action, this isn’t what the book is about. It is a story of grief and what we are willing to do when we are unwilling to accept a loved ones passing.

Kesta is a good lead, I really felt for her grief and desire to find a cure for Tim. I also felt bad for her she is clearly wanting to do the right thing by finding a cure for the disease, to work with all the right people but she is doing it for all the wrong reasons. While Tim spends more of the story as mostly a sedated zombie the book does a good job of still portraying him as a well rounded character, much of that through flashbacks. He isn’t a mindless zombie as other zombie books may portray them as, he feels like more of a man aware that is trapped within his own body. Its a sad portrayal of zombies considering what happens to others in the book.

For a zombie story I found the origin to be quite unique to other zombie stories. They don’t explain everything, that isn’t what the story is about and I wasn’t really sad that it doesn’t cover every detail of how the disease made it into humans. I think one of my favorite parts of this movie is that humans are dangerously capable of surviving. It is what has been driving humans for years and they show how resilient they are in continuing to survive even if it comes with heartbreaking trauma as many of the people that stand up and stop the infected are loved ones.

The writing of this book can sometimes be a bit difficult to follow. Each chapter seems to start with a flashback that can at times get a little difficult to follow. Sometimes it doesn’t feel like it is transitioning into a flashback which made some of the chapters feel a little clunky. The pacing at time can get a little slow, there isn’t a lot of action in this book and some of the scenes feel like they drag on a little too long even though it isn’t that long of a book. It is still a good book.

I really loved how the book brought Kesta full circle with what happened with Tim. This is a book about the process and cycle of grief and you can feel it working its way through the stages of grief to come to a heartbreaking but satisfying conclusion of her story.

I was honestly hooked since reading the dedication, and it didn’t let up.

Well into the zombie apocalypse, life functions normally. People still go to work, buy groceries, and scientists are working to find a cure. All the zombies were rounded up and disposed of by the government, except for one.

Kesta secretly keeps her undead husband chained in the bedroom, hoping to keep him stable until a cure. She is a mess, beleaguered with grief and simultaneously holding on to hope.

I like the scientific bits explaining how this zombie virus works. The pacing is slow, but heartfelt. It feels like a mix of Contagion (2011) where you have virologists running around and testing vaccines, and Resident Evil (2002) with a secret underground lab and a zombie outbreak.

Thank you so much to @netgalley and Gallery Books for the eARC in exchange for my honest review!

If you’re a fan of science heavy Sci-Fi (especially the kind that leans into virology, pathology, and real world plausibility), then One Yellow Eye is absolutely worth your time. Think Contagion, but with a zombie twist.

What sets this book apart is how deeply it immerses you in the scientific process behind a zombie outbreak. The protagonist, a pathologist, is laser focused on saving her husband, who was infected during the initial wave of the virus. While the emotional stakes are clear, the book prioritizes her methodical efforts to understand and combat the infection over heavy character development or backstory. For me, that was a huge win.

This is not a typical zombie thriller. It's quieter, more cerebral, and deeply grounded in the biology of the apocalypse. If you enjoy pandemic fiction that treats science seriously and centers a determined, competent woman at its core, you’ll find One Yellow Eye a gripping and refreshingly smart read.

Many thanks to NetGalley, Gallery Books, and Leigh Radford for the ARC. All opinions are my own.

🐍🔬👁 Til death👁🔬🐍

And sometimes even beyond that....

A love story, a grief story, a secret...

How far will you go for the ones you love?

Kesta took the promise of "in sickness and in health" to heart and did everything and more to get her beloved back. Obsessively so. Months after the "zombie" outbreak and it being contained and all of the infected being eradicated, she holds a secret, her infected husband chained and maintained "alive" while she tries everything to find a cure.

And try everything she does.

This goes into how we got to where we are in the zombie apocalypse and all the scientific intricacies of how to cure the outbreak.

It had me with one tab open to Google terms and with tissues nearby when things got too feely. I was heavily invested in this, a mix between 28 days later and Grays Anatomy with a hint of I-Zombie. This was a good story into a zombie outbreak not leaning into random people surviving, but to the overlooked part of society, the scientist, that desperately look for answers while also grieving their own personal loses. It goes into her stages of grief, especially the denial and anger one, where she turns her back on anyone that doesn't aid her cause.

I really enjoyed this book and look forward to reading more from this author!

I would love to thank NetGalley for allowing me to read and review this e-book ARC in exchange for an honest review

Love. Science. Grief. Zombies.
How far would you go to save the one you love? How set in stone are your ethics? What would drive you to do what you previously thought was the unimaginable.
One Yellow Eye is an ode to grief, while also being wildly entertaining and smart. If you can't see the world in shades of gray, Kesta and Tim will manifest it for you by the end of the novel.

As London is rebuilding in the wake of a zombie epidemic, medical scientist Kesta Shelley is harboring a deadly secret. The zombified remains of her beloved husband Tim is kept restrained in her home as she races against time to find a cure to restore him to his former mortal state.

Throughout the story, Kesta's love for Tim is palpable, obsessive; what would otherwise be a beautiful love story is grotesquely disfigured by horrific scenes of a weatherworn Kesta romancing the sedated remains of her husband. This presented a wonderful, classic horror vibe ala Mary Shelley (likewise the notable surname for Kesta). It was fun for this classic horror fan to encounter this type of styling in a modern horror book -- just the thought of keeping an undead loved one hidden away in a guest bedroom is by itself incredibly chilling.

Much like the horror elements, the "sci" was similarly strong in this "sci-fi." Radford did not shy away from a commendable deep dive into biological science -- both in what Kesta encounters peering into her microscope and an ultimate biological exploration and explanation for the zombie epidemic. Horror/Sci-fi must be one of the most challenging genres to tackle, let alone in a debut novel! This will be an author to follow for sure.

While Kesta's descent into madness is a slow burn, the story is so artfully woven that I enjoyed the ride. That said, after such careful weaving of the proverbial web, the ending came quickly, and I wasn't completely satisfied with where we landed… After the creepiness of the buildup, I was hoping for a metaphorical twist of the knife to play us off, but perhaps that is just the old-school horror fan in me talking.

If you are a fan of classic, gothic horror like Mary Shelley or Edgar Allan Poe, you will love this book. Also, sci-fi fans with a flair for the macabre, like readers of S.A. Barnes, will similarly take to this story. I have to say, I am enjoying this new examination of zombies from a more empathetic angle. Another fantastic selection in this vein is It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over, by Anne de Marcken.

Thank you to NetGalley, Leigh Radford, and Gallery Books for sending me an ARC of this book. All opinions are my own.