The author of the great post-apocalyptic novel Riddley Walker is dead at age 86. If you liked The Road or Clockwork Orange, I’d encourage you to check Riddley Walker out.
But you might know Hoban’s name because he also wrote the much beloved, Bread and Jam for Frances. (I fondly remember Frances’s lunch in that book, because it featured a hard-boiled egg with salt, and I had never heard of anything so outrageous when I was three years old. So I think Hoban might have inspired me to eat my first hard-boiled egg, too; books are weird and wonderful things.)
On a related note, “Riddley Walker” made the cut in Anthony Burgess’s “99 Novels” which, considering the inventive language of that and “A Clockwork Orange”, isn’t too surprising. But “Riddley” is hard to get into for a lot of people, unsurprisingly. I’ve read a few of his other novels, too, and they are interesting and wry. It’s a pretty strange book, but I particularly like “Medusa Frequency”.
Hoban also wrote the book that the “Emmet Otter’s Jugband Christmas” movie is based on.