Award-winning Earth Abides is one of the most influential futuristic novels of the twentieth century. It remains a fresh, provocative story of apocalyptic pandemic, societal collapse, and rebirth.

'Ish' Williams is an intelligent, bookish, slightly passive young man who is one of the few human survivors of a catastrophic virus outbreak. He slowly meets other survivors, and eventually they group together to become members of The Tribe.

Earth Abides describes the journey of Ish, as a survivor and young man, as a reluctant leader, as a torch-bearer of the hope for the re-establishment of the former civilization, as a semi-god and The Last American, and finally as an old man who accepts that man will survive in new ways, not in the old ways, and that no matter what, that the Earth itself will abide.