Dmitry Glukhovsky · 2005 · survival

Dmitry Glukhovsky's 2005 novel. Twenty years after the bombs, what is left of Moscow lives in the metro - every station its own settlement, with its own politics, religion and border guards. Artyom is sent from the last station on the northern line to Polis at the centre, carrying a warning. Every station he passes through is a real one.

1. 1
   VDNKh

   The last inhabited station on the northern line, and Artyom's home. The stalker Hunter arrives hunting the Dark Ones and leaves him a task: if I do not come back, get to Polis and tell them what is coming.

2. 2
   Rizhskaya

   Artyom falls in with Bourbon, a smuggler who offers to guide him south through the bad tunnels in exchange for ammunition - the first of the older men who take him up, use him, and do not outlive him.

3. 3
   Sukharevskaya

   Bourbon dies in the tunnel of something in the pipes that only Artyom can hear, and the mystic Khan collects him - a man who says the dead now wander the tunnels because radiation has abolished heaven.

4. 4
   Kitay-Gorod

   Khan leads him down to Kitay-Gorod, where the caravan routes cross and every faction has an interest - and where Artyom's luck runs out and he is taken by the Fourth Reich.

5. 5
   Pushkinskaya

   In the Reich's stations Artyom is sentenced to hang for killing an officer, and is saved by a Red Line raiding party arriving on precisely the wrong day for the fascists and the right one for him.

6. 6
   Polyanka

   A station out of a dream, lit by fires, where two calm men and a cat talk to him about Metro-2 - the secret government system beneath the metro, which he will need before the book is done.

7. 7
   Polis

   The four joined stations under the old library, the last place with electricity, books and scholars. Artyom delivers Hunter's warning; the council debates it for a day and votes to do nothing at all.

8. 8
   The Great Library

   The Brahmins send him up to the Lenin Library for a book that may hold the answer. It is full of librarians - ape-like things that will not attack a man who meets their eyes. Danila does not come back down.

9. 9
   Smolenskaya

   Sent back through the ruins rather than the tunnels, Artyom crosses the surface along Novy Arbat among dog packs and things that fly - and finds Melnik waiting at the station with a dead man's envelope.

10. 10
    Kievskaya

    He meets Anton, a rocket engineer who knows how the pre-war missiles work, and Anton's small son Oleg - and that night Oleg is taken out of the station by something moving in the tunnels.

11. 11
    Park Pobedy

    The deepest station in Moscow, supposedly abandoned, turns out to be full of people - deformed, brainwashed, cannibal, worshipping a Great Worm invented by a priest who cheerfully admits he made it up.

12. 12
    Metro-2

    Through a hatch in a tunnel roof into the secret system built for the government, and on to D-6 - the bunker where a surviving missile battery can still be aimed at anything left on the surface.

13. 13
    VDNKh

    Before going up, Artyom asks for a few hours to go home. The station is barely holding, its defenders going mad from what reaches them in the night, and he says goodbye to Sukhoi without saying why.

14. 14
    Ostankino Tower

    Three hundred metres up the television tower, the Botanical Garden and the Dark Ones' hive spread out below, Ulman radios the coordinates - and the Dark Mind reaches Artyom at last and tells him what they wanted.