Book 15: "Heroes and Villains" by Angela Carter

[kittiwake]

During the war, the Professors were safe in the deep shelters, while everyone else had to survive as best they could on the surface. Centuries later, the Professors live in fortified villages with Workers to do the farming and housework. The villages are periodically raided by nomadic barbarian tribes, who take ammunition, cloth, food, and women, some of whom go willingly. And then there are the Out People, mutants who live in holes in the ground, use bows and arrows rather than guns, and attack both of the other groups when they can.

Marianne is a Professor's daughter who leaves the safety and boredom of life in a village to live with the tribe who has just attacked her village and finds that it is not like she expected. This was Angela Carter's fourth novel and I hadn’t even heard of it before finding it at a bookCrossing meet-up. It was very interesting but tailed off at the end.