On the Beach

New York: Signet, 1958. First paperback printing [stated]. Mass market paperback. 238, [2] pages. Parts of book had become separated from cover and were reglued. Book remains fragile but is intact. Nevil Shute Norway (17 January 1899 – 12 January 1960) was an English novelist and aeronautical engineer who spent his later years in Australia. He used his full name in his engineering career and Nevil Shute as his pen name, in order to protect his engineering career from inferences by his employers (Vickers) or from fellow engineers that he was '"not a serious person" or from potentially adverse publicity in connection with his novels, which included On the Beach and A Town Like Alice. His first published novel was Marazan, which came out in 1926. After that he averaged one novel every two years through the 1950s, with the exception of a six-year hiatus while he was establishing his own aircraft construction company, Airspeed Ltd. Sales of his books grew slowly with each novel, but he became much better known after the publication of his third to last book, On the Beach, in 1957. Shute's novels are written in a simple, highly readable style, with clearly delineated plot lines. Many of the stories are introduced by a narrator who is not a character in the story. The common theme in Shute's novels is the dignity of work, spanning all classes, whether a Spanish bar hostess in the Balkans or brilliant boffin. His books are in three main clusters, early pre-war flying adventures; Second World War; and Australia. In the Readers' List of the Modern Library 100 Best Novels of the 20th century, A Town Like Alice came in at number 17, Trustee from the Toolroom at 27, and On the Beach at 56. On the Beach is a post-apocalyptic novel published in 1957, written by British author Nevil Shute after he emigrated to Australia. The novel details the experiences of a mixed group of people in Melbourne as they await the arrival of deadly radiation spreading towards them from the Northern Hemisphere, following a nuclear war the previous year. As the radiation approaches, each person deals with impending death differently. Shute's initial story was published as a four-part series, The Last Days on Earth, in the London weekly periodical Sunday Graphic, in April 1957. For the novel, Shute expanded the storyline. The story has been adapted twice as a film (in 1959 and 2000) and once as a BBC radio broadcast in 2008. Printings of the novel, including the first 1957 edition by William Morrow and Company, New York, contain extracts from Eliot's poem on the title page, under Shute's name, including the above quotation and the concluding lines: This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper. The 2000 film ends with a quote from Walt Whitman's poem "On the Beach at Night", describing how a father comforts his small daughter who is frightened as an approaching cloud bank blots out the evening stars one by one. Although Whitman's poem resembles the plot of Shute's novel, the book does not reference it, as it does Eliot's poem. Historian David McCullough, writing for The New York Times, called On the Beach "the most haunting evocation we have of a world dying of radiation after an atomic war." The San Francisco Chronicle called it "the most shocking fiction I have read in years. What is shocking about it is both the idea and the sheer imaginative brilliance with which Mr. Shute brings it off." Daily Telegraph called it "Shute's most considerable achievement", and The Times stated that it is "the most evocative novel on the aftermath of a nuclear war." The Guardian commented that "fictions such as On the Beach played an important role in raising awareness about the threat of nuclear war. We stared into the abyss and then stepped back from the brink." The Los Angeles Times described the novel as "timely and ironic... an indelibly sad ending that leaves you tearful and disturbed", and The Economist called it "still incredibly moving after nearly half a century." Floyd C. Gale of Galaxy Science Fiction called the book "an emotional wallop. It should be made mandatory reading for all professional diplomats and politicians." Condition: Fair.

Keywords: Nuclear War, Radiation, Fallout, Mortality, Atomic War, Melbourne, Australia, Contamination, Survivors, Survival, Suicide

[Book #84175]

Price: $25.00

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