The Space Between The Stars by Anne Corlett

There's a virus.  It's spreading to every occupied world.  There's a very minuscule chance of survival.  She never expected to.  When she has lived through it, she finds everyone else on the ranch has turned to dust.  Is she the only left on this world?

Berkley sent me an ARC of this book to read for review (thank you).  It will be published today.

When everything else is gone, what do you do?  You gather food and then look for others.  While you're doing that you have plenty of time to think about the past.  How you were never good enough for your stepmother.  How you stepped away from the man you lived with when you lost your baby.  If it makes no difference now about where you go, where would you want to go?  She decides she wants to go back to earth, back to her home town.

She meets an ex-priest and a scientist whose mind is a bit messed up.  When they find a space ship, they beg passage.  He will allow them to board but he's just going to the capital center, not all the way to earth.  She decides that's closer than where she is now.

There are communities that are being run by dictatorship.  A home where everyone is dressed in old fashion clothes and they're pretending to live in another era.  A community that has no women and wants to acquire the ones on the spaceship.  There's lots of room for thought in the situations the author creates for her characters.

I liked the ending.  It was dramatic, people died, but the right ones lived and life will go on.  Sometimes that's all you can do.  This was a better than usual apocalyptic novel.