Walter M. Miller Jr

Walter M. Miller was a Catholic writer who mainly wrote short stories, but he best known for his Hugo award winning novel A Canticle for Leibowitz.  He lived a reclusive life and only wrote one other novel, a sequel he had almost finished before his death called Saint Leibotwitz and the Wild Horse Women.

A Canticle for Leibowitz

This is widely considered to be one of the greatest post apocalyptic novels ever written.  Post apocalyptic novels deal with a near future world shortly after some great event (rise of zombies, asteroid, nuclear war, etc.) has wiped out modern civilization and most modern technology.  This is a collection of 3 connected stories, with the first beginning 600 years after a global nuclear war.  After the nuclear war there was a mass destruction of learning and technology by many of the survivors.  A US military engineer named Leibowitz founded a Catholic monastic order and the 3 stories are about monks in his order and the attempt to preserve technology and knowledge.

The first story deals with a monk, Brother Francis, who stumbles upon a fallout shelter that contains many relics from Leibowitz's life written down on ancient memo pads.  He rewrites one document as an illumination and attempts to bring it and original documents to the Pope to help canonize Leibowitz, but is beset by wandering bands of fallout mutants called Pope's Children.    The second act is set 600 years later, and centers around a new renaissance of learning with the scientist Thon Taddeo reconstruction of electrical generators based partly on the Leibowitz documents.  Meanwhile, the city states of Texarkana and Laredo are planning to attack the city of Denver to gain control of a large part of North America and this results in a church schism.  In the third act, set another 600 years in the future, nuclear power and space flight have both been rediscovered and the world is on the brink of another nuclear war between two great powers in Europe and the Americas.  New Rome has plans for escaping the earth to continue life and knowledge on colonized planets, which becomes necessary after nuclear war breaks out again.

The novel has many major thematic elements.  The most obvious one is the recurrence of history with parallels to what happened to Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire.  The necessity for civilization in the preservation of knowledge over time and the conflict between church and state are both repeatedly brought up. There is also a major discussion of the Catholic ethics of euthanasia between a priest and a government official in the third act.

On the whole this novel is appropriate for most older teens and it contains intelligent discussions of major religious and ethical themes..  There is a good bit of violence, but it is for thematic or religious points and isn't gratuitous.  There are a lot of books that deal with similar post apocalyptic settings (Warday, World War Z, The Road, The Postman, etc.), but those almost all focus on what it would be like to live and survive in that sort of setting.  This is much more focused on permanent themes and the nuclear apocalypse is more of an excuse to explore those themes.