Susan Watkins' monograph Contemporary Women's Post-Apocalyptic Fiction (2020) offers a new and distinctive perspective to the growing body of scholarship on post-apocalyptic fiction with the post-apocalyptic turn in recent decades. Watkins focuses on exploring how contemporary women novelists “successfully transform and rewrite the apocalyptic genre to imagine different possible futures for humanity post-apocalypse” (1). Her studies enrich the nascent researches on this genre represented by Claire P. Curtis' Post-Apocalyptic Fiction and the Social Contract: “We'll Not Go Home Again” (2010), Majid Yar's Crime and the Imaginary of Disaster: Post-Apocalyptic Fictions and the Crisis of Social Order (2015), Heather J. Hicks' The Post-Apocalyptic Novel in the Twenty-First Century: Modernity beyond Salvage (2016), and Mark Payne's Flowers of Time: On Post-Apocalyptic Fiction (2020). This book is comprised of an introduction, five analytical chapters, and a conclusion. Its choice of texts is very extensive, primarily including more than twenty contemporary women's post-apocalyptic fiction since 2000 from the UK and North America.In the “Introduction: Rewriting and Transforming Tradition,” Watkins lays out the scope and themes of this book. This part opens with a series of probing questions: “How is contemporary women writers' writing of the apocalypse distinctive? Why do so many texts that are set in a post-apocalyptic future focus on men who are trying to survive, trying to protect women and trying to rebuild things the way they were before? Why is there so much emphasis on men's nostalgia for the world before things changed?”(1). These questions fully engage readers' attention and enable them to understand the aim of the book, “to establish the distinctive ways in which contemporary women writers imagine the apocalypse” (2). Watkins then offers a useful overview of the specific contexts which explain the prevalence of post-apocalyptic fiction in different times since 1989. It is noteworthy that she encapsulates three salient post-apocalyptic features shared by the novels she discusses, which helps readers understand the scope of her subsequent analytical chapters better. They are “the world before the disaster is in living or cultural memory” (9), “the clear attribution of blame for the apocalyptic disaster on human carelessness for the environment, the excesses of techno-science and capitalist exploration of natural resources,” and “the focus of the narratives is on taking the chance to rebuild in a different way” (9–10). She claims that it is very important to examine how women writers “work to rewrite and transform the male-authored texts that also contribute to that field” and “acknowledge the literary history of women's work in the ‘ustopian’ and apocalyptic genres and pinpoint how they build on their ancestor's work” (14).Then five analytical chapters are devoted to explicating the distinctiveness of contemporary women's post-apocalyptic fiction. In the second chapter “Science, Nature and Matter,” Watkins utilizes new materialist theories, especially those of Karen Barad and Stacy Alaimo to examine how Jane Rogers's The Testament of Jessie Lamb (2011), Margaret Atwood's The Year of the Flood (2009), and Sarah Hall's The Carhullan Army (2007) re-explore the relationship between science, nature and matter from the perspective of attitudes to gender and sexuality. She places these novels within the tradition of feminist science fiction and puts forward the most compelling argument that these novels push out “our gendered thinking in relation to science and technology and culture by focusing on the concept of matter and materiality” (44). The third chapter “The Posthuman Body” draws on Donna Haraway's ideas concerning humans' kinship with machines, animals and plants to elaborate how Tama Janowitz's They Is Us (2008), Jeanette Winterson's The Stone Gods (2007), Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake (2003), and Nnedi Okorafor's The Shadow Speaker (2007) rewrite and rework “the motifs of gendered embodied selfhood that are key to conventional apocalyptic narratives—narratives of loss, nostalgia or mourning” (77) through a new mode of posthumanism. In the fourth chapter “The Maternal Imaginary,” Watkins uses Luce Irigaray's work concerning the figure of the mother to elaborate how Maggie Gee's The Ice People (1998), Julie Myerson's Then (2011), Jeanette Winterson's The Stone Gods (2007), and Megan Hunter's The End We Start From (2017) utilize the maternal imaginary to question and disrupt patriarchal culture. In the fifth chapter “Time, Narrative and History,” Watkins draws on Elizabeth Grosz's idea of the rupture or “nick” and Haraway's conception of the Chthulucene to examine “some of the different ways in which contemporary women writers make contortions or conundrums around time, narrative and history central to their post-apocalyptic texts” (135). The novels examined include Nalo Hopkinson's Brown Girl in the Ring (1998), Doris Lessing's Mara and Dann (1999) and General Dann (2005), Maggie Gee's The Flood (2004), Atwood's MaddAddam trilogy (2003–2013) and Liz Jensen's The Rapture (2009). She posits that contemporary women's post-apocalyptic fiction uses the device of the sequel “to generate a state of suspension, proliferation or unfinished process that functions as a characteristically imaginative questioning of conventional conceptions of time, narrative and history” (136). By employing Adrienne Rich's conception of writing as “revision” and Luce Irigaray's ideas about systems of exchange, the sixth chapter “Literature and the Word” focuses on exploring how Lionel Shriver's The Mandibles: A Family 2029–2047 (2016), Nnedi Okorafor's Who Fears Death (2010), Doris Lessing's Mara and Dann (1999), Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven (2014), Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam (2013) utilize the strategy of rewriting and the idea of the palimpsestic text to revise meanings after the apocalypse and envision a new future. Watkins claims that “contemporary women writing post-apocalyptic fictions suggest positive futures for literature after the apocalypse” (191).In the conclusion, Watkins highlights the post-secular turn in contemporary women's post-apocalyptic fiction which “stakes a comic claim for the importance of plural spiritual narratives rather than tragic, singular, fundamentalist, phallogocentric ones” and “the embrace of post-secular spirituality is a significant element of these novels” (200). She uses Octavia Butler's Parable novels, Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998) and Nicola Barker's H(A)PPY (2017) to illustrate her argument.Watkins' book is a meticulously researched work in which she tellingly reveals the distinctive innovations that contemporary women writers make in the genre of post-apocalyptic fiction. It addresses issues of nationality, race and ethnicity, as well as gender and sexuality, filling a notable gap in previous scholarship on post-apocalyptic fiction. One of its compelling aspects is that Watkins develops a multi-faceted interdisciplinary approach and seamlessly weaves textual analyses with various critical theories. Her insightful reading of so wide a range of contemporary women's post-apocalyptic fiction from multiple perspectives is very impressive. She employs a variety of critical lenses such as feminocentric Afrofuturism, new materialist theories, cyborg studies, posthumanism, feminist theory, and the Chthulucene to comprehensively illuminate how contemporary women's post-apocalyptic fiction rewrites and transforms the conventions of this genre. Undoubtedly, this book leaves readers with a strong desire to delve into the fullness and richness of contemporary women's s post-apocalyptic fiction. Considering a substantial number of novels are examined within the limited space, it is understandable that for some novels the textual analyses don't go deep. A volume such as this can never hope to be fully insightful and thorough at every level. Moreover, the conclusion is more like another chapter in this book because readers expect a good summary of her ideas from the conclusion than just the single aspect of the post-secular. Overall, Watkins' book is a valuable resource for those students and scholars who are interested specifically in contemporary women's post-apocalyptic fiction, or, more broadly, in the genre of post-apocalyptic fiction.