I've always had a fascination for detailed end-of-the-world predictions, so when I became aware of this book I immediately ordered it from Amazon. All of humanity dying from global nuclear warfare? Sign me up!

The premise is great, but the execution is flawed. Even if you give generous allowances for the fact that the book was written in 1957, the science in the book is maddeningly idiotic. The depicted slow and steady encroachment of radiation southwards and the 100% fatality rate all over the globe just does not match with reality.

If the rest of the book was great, the above could be forgiven. But sadly it is not. As someone else pointed out, people in the book have exactly two reactions to their impending doom: either they are incredibly stoic about it and go on as before, or they refuse to believe it and go on as before. It defies explanation why someone would write a book about the world ending and spend almost all of the book describing banal household chores.

This is especially true since for a couple of pages Shute provides a magnificent example of what I was hoping to find throughout the whole book, when he describes a chaotic car race where people race as if their lives were meaningless, which they are since they'd rather die now than from radiation sickness in a week's time. This is the kind of thing that his setting enables him to write about that could never be duplicated in any other place, and I wish he had extended that approach to the rest of the book.

For example, take sex. All of the characters in the book are unbelievably chaste, even the one the author clearly intends to be risqué. There is not a single sexual event in the book, or a hint that one takes place off-screen. It does not take great imagination to guess that if everyone knew they were going to die in the very near future, sexual behavior would take some extreme forms. Birth control, sexual diseases, and possible harm to one's image would all become meaningless. Also, there wouldn't be any real consequences from raping someone, or lots of someones for that matter. Civilization would degrade into anarchy as no one would have any leverage to force anyone else to behave in a normal manner.

It's entirely possible such a book is impossible to write without it degenerating into a random series of violent acts. I would still like to read it someday, however.