Ashes

Ashes is a young adult novel by Ilsa J. Bick, published in 2011. It begins with a wave of electromagnetic energy that crosses the world and alters everyone it leaves alive.

Alex is seventeen, resourceful and running from a diagnosis she cannot do anything about when the pulse arrives. Most of the population dies. The survivors are divided between those who are transformed into something close to zombies and those who acquire senses far sharper than human ones, which is what happens to Alex herself. She joins forces with Tom, a soldier who has come home from the war in Afghanistan, and Ellie, an angry eight-year-old whose family is gone, and the three of them travel through a country that no longer has any working institutions, living off what can be scavenged and learning who can be trusted.

The novel is the first of a trilogy, and its interest is in what survivors do to one another once the immediate emergency has passed and nobody is left to keep order. The changed senses that make Alex formidable also make her a target for everyone who wants what she can do.