Ask me what books made the biggest impression on me in my childhood and one of my answers would be Nevil Shute’s On The Beach – an unforgettable vision of a post-apocalyptic world. In that book, Captain Towers hears a faint Morse code signal, transmitting from far away, and heads off on a tour of a ruined world, seeking life.

I suspect that Peter Heller is also familiar with On The Beach. His debut book, The Dog Stars, is simply masterful. Unlike other writers of this genre, who focus on the scientific or other-worldly reasons for the apocalyptic event, or move forward in a plot-driven manner, Mr. Heller writes beautifully and powerfully about how the events affect one person, a contractor, poet and pilot named Hig.

It is Hig’s fate to watch the extinction of everything and everybody he once loved: his pregnant wife Melissa, the tigers, elephants, apes, baboons and cheetahs and eventually, the last trout – a heartache for this avid fisherman.

The prose is fragmented, accurately mimicking how someone who has not needed to talk or communicate for many years and has “lost the touch.” Hig’s only companion is a gun nut named Bangley, who is fleshed out and given an affecting back story, and his loyal and aging dog Jasper. Hig reflects, “There is no one to tell this to and yet it seems very important to get this right. The reality and what it is like to escape it. That even now it is sometimes too beautiful to bear.” And a little later, “So I wonder what it is this need to tell. To animate somehow the deathly stillness of the profoundest beauty. Breathe life in the telling.”

That is precisely what he does. Hig will eventually try to track down a static-broken voice he heard on the radio years ago in much the same way that Captain Towers follows the enigmatic Morse code signal. And like Captain Towers, he will find comfort in surprising places.

Much of this book is surprisingly heartbreaking in its beauty. As Hig faces the toughest existential questions about life – and wonders why he is struggling so hard to survive in a world devoid of what and who he loves the most – he learns that hope and love and decency and humanity can come when you least expect it. And he discovers that life and death live inside each other “waiting for warmer nights, a compromised system, a beetle, as in the now dying black timber on the mountain.” Mr. Heller tackles nothing less than the reasons for living and the hopeless cycles that we all must go through. This is a book that showcases an author who already possesses a voice to follow.