Loved this book. It has all the elements a great PA book should have. Hopelessness. Danger. Hope. Redemption. And the crazy unbelievable will of humans to survive at any cost. It tells a story of a young man's, Artyom's, journey to save what may be the last few thousand of earth's inhabitants who are holed up, for some twenty years, in the Russian underground metro system after a salvo of nuclear and biological weapons between the U.S. and Russia have made the world mostly uninhabitable. Will the human race survive by banding together to beat back the dark forces and creatures mutated from radiation and biological weapons? Or will it merely waste away little by little until humans are completely erased from the Earth? 
 And what a journey he takes...through the dark tunnels and the grimy, unlighted underground platforms of the once majestic Moscow subway system. Glukhovsky does a great job of describing the dark, dank, mostly hopeless metro stations, the feel of moving around in the dark, endlessly long, mind-numbing and mindtrick-playing tunnels which connect station to station, the uniqueness of each station with their own type of government/society, the toll living like this takes on the human psyche, the dangers involved moving through the system and scavenging topside, and the wonderful characters Arytom receives help from/meets along his trek...the fascists, the religious zealots, the communists, the hookah-smoking Russian soldiers. It is mostly a tale of that journey and what Artyom discovers about life and especially about himself on the way. Sort of "LOTR" meets The Road" but more realistic than "LOTR" and even grittier than "The Road"...with a bit of mysticism and philosophy thrown in. 
 It wasn't an easy read from the start...the translation from Russian may have left it lacking in some spots and the Russian names for all of the real-life metro stations were hard to keep track of (this is one of those books where it is helpful to have a good map) and, I found it a bit off putting for its total lack of female characters or even mention of women in the story at all...but it was a fun and original ride.