The SYLE Press
The Fratellini Winter they had called it, after the Italian scientist who had first detected the decline in solar radiation. The seasons pass and the cold bites ever harder. The Thames freezes over, stocks of food and fuel run low, and London falls under martial law. That first arctic winter, it seems, was only …
‘It is always nonsense for us that says some are chosen and others left to die. If that should be, it is better not to be chosen.’
‘You mean, we’re all chosen.’
‘No,’ Dadda said. ‘I mean, we are all left to die.’
One night, the island of Guernsey convulsed. As shock followed shock, the landscape tilted violently in defiance of gravity. When dawn came and the quakes had stilled to tremblings, Matthew Cotter gazed out in disbelief at the pile of rubble that had been his home…
London in the late forties: strange shifting times in the aftermath of the war. A motley sample of humanity has washed up on the shores of the down-at-heel boarding house that is 36 Regency Gardens, their mutual proximity enforced by shared impoverishment…
In 1949, Sam Youd – who would later go on, as John Christopher, to write The Death of Grass and The Tripods – published his first novel. As he later said:
I knew first novels tended to be autobiographical and was determined to avoid that. So my main character was a woman …
An Englishman’s home, supposedly, is his castle, and property developer Rod Gawfrey was incensed when a gang of hooligans gatecrashed his son’s party, infiltrating the luxury residence that was also home to his wife’s parents and her sister Jane.
When the storm rages and the avalanche cuts off power and phone lines, no one in the chalet is particularly bothered. There are kerosene lamps, a well-stocked bar and food supplies more than adequate to last them till the road to Nidenhaut can be opened up…
The Chung-Li virus has devastated Asia, wiping out the rice crop and leaving riots and mass starvation in its wake. The rest of the world looks on with concern, though safe in the expectation that a counter-virus will be developed any day. Then Chung-Li mutates and spreads…
Five people enter the Frohnberg caves, three men and two women. In the glare of the Austrian sunshine, the cool underground depths seem an attractive proposition – until the collapse of a cave wall blocks their return to the outside world. Faced with an unexplored warren of tunnels and caves …
A disparate group of Londoners are brought together by Sweeney, a mysteriously charismatic man of wealth, for a luxury cruise in the South Pacific – they know not why. Sailing far from the normal shipping routes, the ship weighs anchor just off an uninhabited tropical island…
It was difficult to tell, looking back, how good a summer that had been. The records gave a statistical answer – at Kew, the century’s fourth best for dryness, the third best in hours of...
The light was poor, the bulbs glowing dully on the inadequate voltage. He ruffled the pages back awkwardly, peering at dates and headlines – back through the early days of scientific reports, dubious prognostications, tucked...
Today the consensus may be that we are heading towards a future of global overheating, but back in the 1960s, when the novel was first published, the talk was of a new Ice Age. In...
‘We’re a bad lot,’ Father Edward said. ‘All of us, Jews or Christians. Christians have persecuted Jews, but they’ve persecuted each other just as much. It’s easier to persecute when you can recognize the ones...
Father Edward seemed more at ease here than I was myself. I thought at first that he might have been here before with Siegfried, but his frank, appraising gaze round the walls made that unlikely....
I said to Solly: ‘Where did you turn up from?’ He said: ‘Benno and I enjoy a game of chess together. He wins mostly, but sometimes I run him close.’ They had met, I found,...
I went up to Liverpool occasionally. I had to, since Dadda would not travel down to see me. His meanness, far from relaxing in the post-war years, grew steadily more pronounced. He would not spend...
Poley left us all standing, his commissions frequently equalling, and even excelling, the combined total of the rest. He could win the confidence of a surprising variety of people. I was in the inner office...
I was not angry any longer, and I really was astonished. I had never expected this kind of thing from Siegfried; his very apparent religious devotion had always seemed the ingrowing kind, rather than the...
I was surprised to find, though, that he disapproved of the idea of working on Sundays. He regarded it as offensive towards the country whose guests we were. ‘I can only do it because people...