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…
‘I’m glad you spoke like that. I must confess I was hoping to provoke you into putting me in my place, Boss. Or should I say, into trying?’ ‘I’m not trying to put you into...
‘You will find Madame in the lounge bar,’ the doorman told him. ‘Through that door, sir, and on your right.’ The room was roughly circular, with the bar cutting an arc across the top. The...
The girl spoke for the first time. She said to Andrew: ‘Could you help me down, please?’ Her voice had the slightest touch of Irish brogue. Andrew assumed she wanted to add the weight of...
Andrew did not at first hear the new command Chisholm gave. It was in a different tone, the voice of a man confident of his response: ‘Masks on.’ It was only as he saw those...
‘Stand back, all of you. This is a military patrol. Get back.’ The man who had previously spoken now said: ‘When I was in the Army we fought for our own folks, not against them....
They had a glimpse of Regent’s Park on their right. Andrew said: ‘What about the Zoo animals?’ ‘They killed them off the day before things were closed down. They brought the carcases of everything that...
The cars rattled along Baker Street at rather better than thirty miles an hour. There were a few signs of life – some figures skulking away into doorways as the patrol reached them, others calling...
‘And what does that give you, with the river as its southern boundary?’ McKay looked up, eyes sharp in his thin face. ‘It gives you the London Pale. The name isn’t official, but it’s apt....
‘I was up at the Pool of London yesterday,’ David said. ‘There are chunks of ice floating. You can cross the river above Chiswick.’ ‘There have been other winters as cold, though, haven’t there?’ With...
‘David,’ she said. ‘He asked if you were here.’ ‘What does he want?’ ‘He asked if he could come and have coffee with us.’ Her hands, as though automatically, went to her dress and fastened...