The Day of the Triffids - Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics

Both revolting and fascinating, THE DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS has for nearly 50 years been so successful that it is almost taken for granted. Suffused with a desperate sense of post-war disgust, THE DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS describes a world in which, following global catastrophe, a handful of survivors scrabble for survival in the ruins of human civilisation. Their plight is infinitely worsened by the existence of triffids - monstrous, stinging plants that live on carrion and who step with aplomb into the evolutionary niche the humans are just evacuating. The unfolding of this disaster in the south of England in the 1950s is carried out by Wyndham with a gripping literary relish in a number of remarkably vivid set-pieces.