By Miranda Reason

Bloomsbury 2026

Reviewed by Sue Wright

There’s a long and vivid history of apocalyptic stories where gods, viruses, infections, invasions or conflicts wipe out civilisation as we know it. Stories range from ancient tales of floods to more modern era tales like The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham (1951), Taronga by Victor Kelleher (1986), Battle Royale by Kyushu Takami (1999), The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins (2008), The Last of Us by Naughty Dog (2013), and Illunimae by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff (2015).

Day of Now by Miranda Reason sits comfortably within this vast, multi-media genre.

In Reason’s debut novel, a global apocalypse has happened and 11 (maybe 12) year old Dayna, her younger brother Pax and their father are surviving in the aftermath. The funghi which releases the toxic spore clouds that infect humans and animals alike is still the biggest threat to survival, but their father has taught Dayna and Pax well. The siblings can read, navigate, fish and hunt, defend themselves and generally keep each other safe. They’re both smart and curious and also love their father’s stories about the dead-world, the time before ‘the craze’ and how gadgets like computers, radios and walkie-talkies worked. Strangely, their father tells them little about their mother or how she died, but his reticence doesn’t stop Dayna from carrying around an old photo of her.

When their father is bitten by a rat with the craze, Dayna and Pax are forced to leave and wait in a nearby vacant house. If their father hasn’t ‘turned’ in two days, he may survive the craze even without a vaccine. While they wait, Pax reveals that he’s brought their long dead uncle’s old walkie-talkie with him. When the siblings manage to get the walkie-talkie working they call for help and a group identifying themselves as the hummingbirds respond.

When some men in a truck turn up offering to take the siblings and their father to a place which has a vaccine for the craze, Dayna and Pax are relieved and grateful. But when they find a badly beaten up teenager (Jason) caged up in the back of the truck the siblings soon realise their mistake, and while they manage to free Jason and escape with the truck, they are soon found and end up having to leave their father behind.

So begins a trek across country to find their father and save him from the hummingbirds who now hold him captive. Along the way Dayna, Pax and Jason must work out who to trust—including each other— if they’re to have any chance of surviving and finding father alive. There are misunderstandings, conflicts and dangers aplenty, including being held captive by a creepy cult leader called Adam who believes himself immune to the craze and wants to repopulate the earth with many of the cult’s ‘Eves’ – which includes Dayna.

But Dayna, Pax and Jason find help along the way, and the group of three grows to include a craze-immune child called Evie and a gun-toting older woman called Jean who just wants to save the archive of dead-world stuff that she’s built.

It’s an apocalyptic world though so dangers lurk everywhere, and when Dayna, Pax and the others do manage to track down the hummingbird headquarters in London, the story takes a darker turn and the siblings must face some awful truths and make some unnerving decisions if they and their friends are to survive.

Miranda Reason offers readers some fun dead-world references as she put her characters through their paces. Dayna is named after Agent Dana Scully from the X-Files, Pax is obsessed with King Kong, there’s a Bart Simpson t-shirt, and a nice nod to the undead that haunt other apocalyptic stories.

The book is tagged as YA, but it’s probably more for pre-teens and younger teens as the characters of Dayna and Pax are quite young and often miss situational contexts which would be immediately apparent to older readers. But in a world of AI and its increasing use to spread disinformation and misinformation, Day of Now offers readers of any age insights into how to work out who to trust and what to believe.