I Bloody Love The End Of The World...

I think more than any other book in this field it gives Humanity another chance it really tries to examine why we build the big red button in the first place

the perfect doomsday transition novel is on the beach by Neville shot 1957 it has a fairly unique depiction of the end of the world

the best example I've come across is Hu how is silo Trilogy thousands of people living in a big underground bunker and we pick up the story Generations after the apocalypse so there's this really interesting cultural distance

I could recommend the 1933 HG Wells novel The Shape of Things to come which has themes of rebuilding civilization after a terrible War and the use of weapons of mass destruction but it does lack the horror of the big bomb