Ahh - thanks all - I abandoned my own thread there - have asked for The Twelve for Christmas so was going to give the Passage another outing beforehand as I read it ridiculously quickly & can't remember all the salient points.
Poppy, shouldn't be too bad with a newborn, just stay away from Cormac McCarthy's The Road, I read it just after DS was born & it very nearly gave me PND due to the unremittingly bleak nature of it all.
Brilliant book, but not great a week post-partum, it affected me so much I gave it an alternative, more sunny ending, I was chatting to a friend about it a few years later & we were talking about the end, I mentioned how I was glad there was a glimmer of hope. They looked at me aghast & invited me to read the last few chapters again.
I did, they were right - I think my mind re-wrote in for self-preservation.