Later, I struggled with Nora Roberts’ obsession with the idea that some things are “meant”, that they’re part of a “destiny”, that it isn’t enough for people to be attractive, privileged, educated and have magical gifts, they also have to have some kind of pintable-tilting agents of fate on their side. Their ability to focus “on what needs doing” is certainly a survival skill but the ease with which they do it, the unthinking adoption of the “I’ll protect Us against Them” mindset and the strong link Nora Robers makes between this stance and The Light made it difficult for me to empathise with or care about these people. Then I thought about the scale of loss, of the billions dead, of cultures across the world extinguished, of losing everyone you ever loved, of having the value of your previous life challenged or eroded and it seemed to me that the main characters react almost as if they’re on medication. What spooked me about it in “Year One” is that Nora Roberts wraps such positive emotions around these values that they slid into my imagination already tagged as a Good Thing. It’s also not so far from the message of “The Stand”. Of course, emergent magical powers are also pretty useful.

It turns out that the secret to surviving the apocalypse is to band together with skilled people who embrace middle-class values, choose faith over fear, work together as a team and focus on “doing what comes next”. The Doom has destroyed their bright futures and now they have to adapt to survive. Most of the main good guy characters in this book come from privileged, sometimes very privileged, backgrounds. It took me a while to isolate the cause: my lack of empathy with middle-class America. Nora Roberts’ accomplished writing kept me reading, in much the same way that high production standards make it easy to watch “Chicago Fire” or “Rookie Blue” but the good guys didn’t become people I cared about and the bad guys seemed more like comic-book demons than people.Ībout halfway through, I realised that, although “Year One” was entertaining enough for me to stick with it to the end, something was preventing me from immersing myself in the story. The bad guys are irredeemably evil and everyone else is either dead or consumed by fear. The good guys are clearly drawn and instantly likeable. It’s an easy to read entertainment that effortlessly manages the large number of characters and multiple initially parallel but eventually converging plot lines. As billions die, some of the immune discover latent magical powers and find themselves drawn to The Dark or The Light.

It tracks the path of groups of survivors of “The Doom”, a virus which kills anyone who is not immune. Year one is sort of urban fantasy twist on “The Stand”.

The one nora roberts