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Thanks for the interest in this! I'd like to answer a few of the queries that have emerged so far.
This book had a very long gestation, and you are not wrong if you think that the England described just before the plague has a somewhat earlier feel than it should. My agent submitted an early draft of the first 15,000 words or so to various publishers; a couple were enthusiastic but didn't think they could make money on it. Times are even tougher for fiction now, so this title has only ever been available as a shareware ebook.
My original intention for the story was to leave the setting open to doubt. There were three possibilities:
1. As described in the final draft.
2. Suter really was the only, and I mean the only, survivor. He has lived alone, in that house by the river, for many years, but now he is sick and dying and the narrative is an hallucination.
3. Suter is a patient in a mental hospital and the whole thing is delusion.
An echo of (2) comes when he is recovering at the end and conflates his room at the rectory with a room in his own house: especially the view from it, including the copper beech. (3) is strongly hinted at in the hospital scene when he is waiting on the stairs. The conflation of the two Helens is part of this too: the man pulled from the river can also be thought of as Suter himself.
In the end I rejected all that as too arty and complicated and just went for the straight narrative, leaving in those few hints and echoes as a way of destabilizing his sanity further.
Suter's obsessive personality would have been the only thing that let him survive alone for so long. Such a man would have gathered absolutely everything and anything he could think of after the plague; his training as a scientist would have made that process even more methodical. His obsession with his former fiancée is a measure of his craziness. After all, what happened between them is nothing unusual or terminally damaging: one just moves on, yet Suter clings to the memory, because it gives him a form of masochistic comfort.
As for the reluctance of the villagers to resist the baddies, that is my view, nowadays, of the English, so much have we been infantilized by the government. Not everyone is like that, of course, but it's the majority reaction. That's why I made Davies a former civil servant. Suter's response to Muriel's report that Bex has confiscated all the weapons -- "Use a brick" -- is completely at odds with attitudes here towards criminals.
One publisher's reader complained that Bex was not evil enough, so in the rewrite I just took my cue from what was in the newspapers -- accounts from Kosovo, Rwanda, Colombia, you name it.
I don't think gasoline or diesel would have become unusable after that period of time, if kept properly sealed. The ammo I don't know about. All the gun stuff came from library books; I know nothing about them myself.
May I also thank those members who have sent me a payment for Refuge? I greatly appreciate your support, but I did waive payment for the purposes of this reading, so please help yourself to another book on the house! Those who didn't mind the violence might like The Penal Colony; those who did should try The Tide Mill.
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