METRO 2034 (A sequel to Metro 2033): First English illustrated edition (METRO by Dmitry Glukhovsky Book 2) Kindle Edition

I was confused by this book initially, and in the end, I was indifferent. Let me give you a perspective of where I am coming from.I read this book after completing the Metro 2033 novel and finishing the Metro 2033 video game. I also read The Gospel According to Artyom before reading this book. I thought I had properly prepared myself for another journey into the Metro. It was only after finishing the book and reading up on its creation that I find out that Dmitri originally created this one as a stand alone novel. The only borrowed character from the first book is Hunter. Whom I was very excited to see had survived!Yet, this book deviates considerably from the Hero's Journey motif of the first book. It plays out a bit more like a romance novel. An old man seeks a hero worthy of his epic that he plans to write. A young girl who feels lost and struggles with concepts of love and betrayal. A man on a mission who will stop at nothing to achieve it, only to fight an internal duality of whether he is a human being or a monster. Can the young girl melt his heart? Can the monster become a man? Kind of sounds like Beauty and the Beast a little doesn't it?While the book is written well and the narrative is relatively easy to follow, it feels a bit out of place in the Metro universe. I found myself losing interest in everything half way through and wasn't really sold on the characters. I didn't care much for any of them and Hunter wasn't the same Hunter from 2033 (He is the same person, but lacks the mystery of his character from the first book). We hardly get to understand him. However, I think that was what Dmitri was going for: a heroes story without a hero. It's less a book about the Metro and more a book about people.While I didn't hate this book, it's potential fell short of expectations created by the first book. It does have some mystery to it and there are creatures, which help give the universe some breadth, but ultimately you'll come out wanting more as this book doesn't answer any questions from the first.

I was caught off-guard by how slow and boring this sequel was. The story is unconvincing and superfluous. It did not come close to drawing me in the way Metro 2033 did (I must have read it 4 times by now).The actual print makes for a fair amount of confusion on who's speaking. There is odd-spacing, unnecessary hyphens, and odd paragraphs. The weapons are described incorrectly and contradictory in many places. A Stechkin is a machine-pistol, for instance, not a revolver. A Krinkov is not a submachine gun, either.Some of the thoughts expressed are wonderfully written, per se, and I hate to assail the author's hard work. However, this book just doesn't add anything, actually raises unanswered questions, and leaves you less satisfied than a date with your cousin.

I first discovered Dmitry Glukhovsky’s METRO series through a video game play on youtube. My son, knowing my love for all things apocalyptic, showed me Let's Play Metro Last Light - Part 1 - In The Beginning… by Christopher Odd. I loved the first video and decided to look into the game. The game was based on a series of novels by Dmitry Glukhovsky. The first two novels were available in English and had audio book versions. The novella which links the first and second book is available in English but has no audio book version. Absolutely no debate on purchasing the audio books.The universe METRO builds begins in our world. The cold war is over. The USSR is a thing of the past although it’s shadow lingers over modern day Russia. The main character, Artyom, is a young adult. He was born before the event but only has very few and fragmented memories of it. On the day of the event, he and his mother were visiting a park close to a metro station. That is why they survived. The metro stations could be sealed to stop contaminants from coming in (the metro was designed and built during the USSR period). Artyom and his mother make it into the metro and past the doors before they are sealed.The metro develops into a new society. As time goes on, the different lines or branches develop different political ideologies. Some stations are more desirable than others, some have more resources, some have ways to grow food underground, some have access to uncontaminated water. Before long treaties are made, broken and fighting begins. The metro is no longer one system but a collection of city states that are connected by dark tunnels.What is in the tunnels is the mystery that lies at the heart of the METRO 2033 book. Traveling even a few hundred meters into the tunnels can be dangerous. Some of the dangers are defined; hordes of rats, mutated life forms that got into the tunnels from above, marauding humans who prey on their own kind. Some of the dangers are undefined. People, groups of people and caravans, evenly armed ones disappear without a trace, without a sound and no sign of struggles. The tunnel dwellers have dubbed the cause of these disappearances as the “Dark Ones”.The website [...] has a virtual tour of all the stations mentioned in the book. It is a wonderful way to connect the descriptions of severely damaged places with what they looked like in reality. Since the story begins in our reality, the photos are showing the reality of the Metro universe before the nuclear event.METRO 2033 is the quest Artyom undertakes to save the entire Metro system. He is tasked with this by a mysterious man who is only referred to as “Hunter”. There is a time element to the quest. As in life in 2016, life in post-apocalypse 2033 does not go as planned. Artyom tours, sometimes unwillingly, many of the various city-states that make up the Metro. It is a fascinating trip. The characters are real. The various ideologies of the city-states are believable. The unknowns in the dark tunnels ratchet up the suspense to terrifying levels. By the end of the book, I was deeply impressed by the world the author created and how much I came to care about the characters in it.METRO 2033: The Gospel According to Artyom is a bridge to METRO 2034. It is only twenty-seven pages but well worth the $2.99 price. Artyom illustrates the consequences of the events the ended METRO 2033. But this short piece also gives significant background into his life before and during the apocalyptic event. It really is worth the price.METRO 2034 begins not long after the end of METRO 2033. The main characters are the “Hunter” from the first book, a man called Homer who believes it is his vocation to write a history and chronicle of the Metro, and a teenage girl named Sasha who has been recently orphaned. Sasha’s father used to be one of the dictator’s of a Metro city-state until he and the girl were banished to an area that had little to no hope of survival. They did survive. Her father managed to live long enough for her to mature and learn to defend herself before his death. Hunter, Homer and Sasha come together in a collision of missions, Sasha’s to survive, Hunter and Homer to find out what happened to a station that no longer broadcasts or sends runners with news. Artyom does not have a large part in this story. He does not make an appearance until Chapter 10. Yet everything that is happening is a consequence of his actions in METRO 2033. The threat this time is not the Dark Ones. It is something much worse and something almost impossible to stop. As with the first book, the characters are fantastic and I grew to care about them. The action is non-stop.The audiobooks of METRO 2033 and METRO 2034 are narrated by Rupert Degas. He is fantastic. His accent for the Russian speakers if marvelous. When simply narrating, not the dialogue, he has a very clear voice with an English accent. His female voices are very well done. I have since added several of his titles to my wish list.The last book in the series METRO 2035 has not been released in English yet. I wonder if a social media campaign of begging to the author could help facilitate that happening.

Right off the bat, I didn't finish this book. It was going nowhere, and I didn't care for any of these characters at all! It started at a good start, but when the book introduced Sasha, that was the moment It started going downhill. It was going back and forth between the characters that I was getting annoyed. If it were just Hunter and Homer, it would be fine, but that wasn't the case. Shame to be perfectly honest, coming from the masterfully crafted 2033, I expected better.2033 had multiple things that 2034 doesn't have; it doesn't have mystery, atmosphere, characters, and moments to be a decent book. If you like these series, you might get some enjoyment, but if you love 2033 like I do, don't touch this.

Don't come to metro 2034 expecting another high octane dash around the Moscow underground, as our eponymous hero escapes one disaster after another. This is a far slower paced novel than its predecessor. Not to say that there is no action, there's still plenty of that but there are significant pauses between them. The emphasis this time is not on the young hero on a traditional quest to save the world (metro) but on an older man trying to make sense of and justify his existence. Whilst being dragged around the metro by events he can barely comprehend, in the company of people he doesn't understand, our new 'hero', chronicles the old world of Moscow and the new world of the metro. In the first book of the series there was much examination of social structures familiar to the reader, in the sequel, the philosophing is more exsenstential. The themes are geared more towards an individuals and humanities place in the history of the universe. This may sound as if it gets very heavy in the narrative, but due to the way the novel is structured, these areas, while frequent, tend towards short bursts that tend not to break the flow to much. In similarities to its predecessor, the author concentrates on the development of his few central characters to the detriment of secondaries. This occasionally jars as people act in ways that can be difficult to work out their motivation, and are very obviously just plot devices to allow progression from point A to point B. In particular the introduction later in the novel of someone who could of been an interesting foil as an anti hero but remains almost unrealised right to the end. The brief return of the original hero is also 'off' as he seems to be written with a different personality. However, despite these criticisms, this is still a strong novel that will feel familiar enough with readers of the first and allows the author to explore and expand the story to the people and places of the metro.

Fantastic book. Definitely worth reading the first one for some of the characters backstories, but fine if you haven't.But go read 2033 first.Thoroughly enjoyed the change of pace from the first book, don't expect "The Continuing Adventures of Artyom", but instead a cracking story set in the Metro a year later with a few very familiar faces

Metro 2034 really does feel like a different book to 2033, but in the same location, instead of following the story of one person, it follows the lives of a series of characters at the same time, swapping between them in the same chapter.Despite this, the story is great, the world building is great and its a great book.However, my biggest concern here is the poor print quality. 3 page 'leaves' fell out whilst reading the book, and there was an ink smudge on about 20 pages (although not in the way of the text).

Got this for a friend, that is very much into the whole post-apocalyptic scene, with a mix of science fiction.The book is set Moscow, Russia, inside the Metro, where people are surviving from the blast of a world nuclear disaster.He enjoyed reading the books, and sped through the whole series like a man on a mission. Definitely recommends if this is your kind of read.

Great book. I love Dmitry as an author because of how well he can build up the world around the characters. The main character is a likeable war hero who has to do what he can to survive. Definitely recommend you buy this book