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    On the Beach
    On the Beach
    On the Beach
    Audiobook9 hours

    On the Beach

    Written by Nevil Shute

    Narrated by Simon Prebble

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    Nevil Shute’s most powerful novel—a bestseller for decades after its 1957 publication—is an unforgettable vision of a post-apocalyptic world.

    After a nuclear World War III has destroyed most of the globe, the few remaining survivors in southern Australia await the radioactive cloud that is heading their way and bringing certain death to everyone in its path. Among them is an American submarine captain struggling to resist the knowledge that his wife and children in the United States must be dead. Then a faint Morse code signal is picked up, transmitting from somewhere near Seattle, and Captain Towers must lead his submarine crew on a bleak tour of the ruined world in a desperate search for signs of life. Both terrifying and intensely moving, On the Beach is a remarkably convincing portrait of how ordinary people might face the most unimaginable nightmare.

    “The most haunting evocation we have of a world dying of radiation after an atomic war.”—The New York Times
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateSep 30, 2011
    ISBN9781456122843

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    Reviews for On the Beach

    4/5

    1,390 ratings89 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Imagine that the northern hemisphere is blanketed with radiation and all animal life is gone. The radiation is moving to the southern hemisphere and latitude by latitude succombs. People living south of Melbourne await what scientists say is inevitable: death. The different ways that people handle this makes it one of those books that is hard to put down.
    • 5/5
      This is a great book, read by a great narrator. Never mind the gravity of the topic, it’s actually an uplifting book about the human spirit. If you liked Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner in the movie, you will love the book. I’m in the process of reading everything that Nevil Shute wrote.
    • 5/5
      This was perfect for the time I was reading it - during the war in the Ukraine, after a couple of Alan Garner books. Very English, very British values, but a beautiful soft vision of the end of the world.
    • 4/5
      What would you do if you know that you will be dead in a few months? What would you do if you know that humanity will disappear shortly after your death? Most authors will tell you a story of struggle and attempt to save humanity. Shute disagrees - in his novel humanity is doomed, even if they are not ready to admit it. It all ended quickly - there was a war, someone threw a bomb, someone returned another and before the dust from the first one cleared, all nuclear arsenals of all nations in the Northern hemisphere were empty - and the end of the world began. There is noone left to tell the story - the people that did not die in those first hours died as the radiation settled on the land. And then it started moving south - due to the way the air masses move around the world, the Southern hemisphere got a bit longer - but Death was coming for them all. And it won't be easy - all the oil used to come from the North so people have to wait to die while finding a way to live.And down at the south end of Australia, the last operational submarine of the US Navy tries to assist the last remaining command anywhere in the world - the Australian Navy's command structure is still in tact - even if they don't have any ships left - due to lack of oil. Early in the novel a second submarine is also available - attached to a friendly command in South America but as the winds keep on moving in their never ending cycle, that one is also lost.The novel is not really about the apocalypse - it is there as a background but it is about the people and how to die with dignity. Some characters are almost cartoonish in their refusal to believe that the end is coming. Some realize all too well that they have no chance so they decide that this is the time to live - and drink all the good booze while at it. A man decides to participate in a car race. Another finds love but decides to resist it because he still feels married to his dead wife. And just because the world ends is not a reason for babies to stop being born or farms to be left untended. And people keep working and trying to find something to do. The start of the novel drags a little bit - it seems almost pointless but as the novel continues that slow start makes more and more sense - the submarine's tour of the North Atlantic destroys the hope of a miracle and that tranquility becomes the counterpoint of the end. It does not even matter who started the war or the fact that as it turns out the retaliation strike was a mistake. One of the last surviving scientists has the best summary: the nuclear weapons got to cheap so everyone had them... even the country which should have been the last one in anyone's expectation to heat the Cold War - the first bomb was thrown by Albania. Once the submarine is back, it is just a matter of time. And yet, people continue living. Maybe somewhere someone tries something. Maybe someone people decide to die earlier. But not the characters we get to know and the news do not report anything of the type either. As the stations of the world slowly stopped transmitting, the coming end is almost like a character of the novel. Reading this in 2022 makes it sound too naive in places but at the same time it made me wonder if that passivity and "it won't happen to me" attitude is really that bizarre. I cannot imagine how that novel (or the movie based on it - apparently there is a movie) read to someone who lived in the mid-50s. And what will stay with me at the end is not the lack of hope but what people cared about at the end - their pets, the farm animals, their children, making sure that everything still looks good. And the big irony that rabbits will outlive everyone (that's Australia - they have interesting history with rabbits) and that Earth will be habitable again in just 20 years - but there won't be anyone and anything left.
    • 3/5
      I am slightly conflicted about 'On the Beach.' I had previously read Shute's 'A Town Like Alice' and liked it for its restrained simplicity of language and plot - never dramatic, but always interesting and full of the colour of the places it described. 'On the Beach' is likewise restrained, but maybe too much - instead of being simple it comes across as overly basic.But is it worth reading? Perhaps. The story is a moving one - I found the ending very affecting, especially since I had gotten to know the characters so well in the preceding couple of hundred pages. But what of those characters? There isn't much to report in this regard - the characters are, for the most part, as bland as the language used to describe them. Only one, Moira, has anything resembling a character arc, shifting from being a drunk to being a loyal companion to the American naval officer she befriends early in the tale.The plot too is essentially non-existent. The action happened before page one, the end of the world has already arrived, and what we see are simply the end days. Shute is at his best when he is describing naval matters - the best parts of the story all take place onboard the submarine tasked with investigating the state of things in the northern hemisphere - but he doesn't think long and hard enough about the societal changes that such a global catastrophe might have wrought. The rich still attend their clubs, where they are waited on by a staff who must be aware that these are the last days of their lives - and yet there is no revolt, there is no dissension, and the essential jobs are still filled by the same people who had filled them previously. Would things have gone that way in real life? It's impossible to tell - but we are getting a glimpse of that world right now.
    • 4/5
      I knew it was going to be sad, but was absolutely devastating.
    • 4/5
      Nevil Shute's post-apocalyptic 1957 novel On the Beach is surprisingly powerful and affecting given the author's mediocre writing style and the mostly mundane day-to-day events that comprise the narrative, albeit against an extraordinary backdrop. A nuclear war has devastated the Northern Hemisphere, and as the novel begins, life continues in Australia, mankind's last remaining outpost, but the radioactive cloud creeps slowly southward, giving its inhabitants approximately nine months to live. The residents carry on with their lives in the face of approaching doom. The submarine captain and his crew perform their assigned missions and tasks, as expected. All have their own individual way of coping with the unimaginable circumstances and the inevitable end that's closing in. Ultimately, this memorable and deeply moving novel simply spotlights the fortitude of ordinary people in an extraordinary situation beyond their control.
    • 2/5
      Although it has a novel concept, this novel doesn't pull it off with the intensity that it deserves.
    • 4/5
      People of Australia are just waiting to die from the fallout of a massive world war. There is no hope of survival, they don't even try. This is a stirring, eerily believable short work by Nevil Shute. The main characters are a US submarine commander, Dwight Towers, and his counterpart, lt. commander Peter Holmes, an Australian. Towers has survived by virtue of being out to sea at the time of the war, Holmes is a married man with a wife and daughter. These men maintain their military personae to the end and are engaged in measuring radiation levels and other useless research, which they recognize as useless even as they carry their orders out.
    • 5/5
      Good read.
    • 5/5
      My grandfather gave me Nevil Shute's novels to read in the sixties but I re-read them last year. On the Beach was one of my favorites. In the movie one of the scenes was set in Frankston Railway Station in Victoria, Australia. I moved to Australia 25 years ago and my grandfather would find it amusing that I now live in Frankston.
    • 4/5
      Preoccupation with The Bomb. Nuclear war. Alphaville wrote Forever Young thinking about the bomb. Randy Newman sneered about dropping the bomb...boom goes London. Shute takes it one step further. The nuclear bombs of World War III  have been dropped and as far as anyone knows, the entire northern hemisphere has been completely wiped out. There's not a soul alive above the equator. It's only a matter of time before winds blow the deadly radioactive fallout to New Zealand and Australia. For naval officers Peter Holmes and Dwight Towers stationed in Melbourne it is their job to pilot a submarine to the northern hemisphere to seek out survivors and make predictions about their own mortality. Will the deadly dust reach them in a year? A month? A week? No matter the time frame for surely they will all die. It's a bleak read, there's no doubt about that, but the characters are worth it. For Dwight Towers, originally from Connecticut, knowing he will never see his wife and children again is a hard pill to swallow. For young and beautiful Moira Davidson drinking her denial is the best policy. Others seek solace in the suicide pill or carrying on as if nothing tragic is going to happen.
    • 5/5
      In this classic 1957 novel, humanity has played a game of global thermonuclear war, and everybody has lost. Everybody. Now, in Australia, the last (temporary) survivors go about their lives knowing that very soon the wind will shift, the fallout from a conflict they had nothing to do with will reach them, and they, too, will die. They approach this ending with a mixture of fatalism and denial, and, if those things fail, large quantities of alcohol.I first read this as a teenager, in the 1980s. I didn't remember anything about the details of the story or the characters, but I have never, ever forgotten the feeling of it, the bleak, oppressive hopelessness of it all. Well, I don't suppose I could have; it's a feeling that cropped up a lot in my nightmares in those days when Mutually Assured Destruction was the law of the land.Reading this book now is not quite the unbearably harrowing experience that it was back then, when some part of me genuinely believed that the kind of events it describes were not just possible, but a little too likely. And I'm glad of that. It's not something I'm eager to relive. But even now, man, it still hits hard.It almost seems like it shouldn't. Shute's writing isn't anything special, and features a few stylistic quirks that don't exactly thrill me, starting with his weird refusal to use a scene break when he switches place and POV. And I don't truly believe that people would react to a situation like this exactly the way that the characters in this book do. But none of that matters, because it works. It works distressingly well. The understated, matter-of-fact way that Shute and his characters approach the end of the world is infinitely more devastating than any amount of angsty hair-tearing could ever possibly be. Mostly it's tiny little details that got me, that snuck up on me and kicked me in the heart. But there are a lot of those. Ultimately, perhaps, the entire novel is made up of them. Just one small, subtly heartbreaking detail after another, on and on, until there aren't any more left, ever.Yeah, it's going to take a while for me to recover from this one. Although, now that I think about it, I'm not sure I ever actually recovered from it the first time.Rating: I don't think I can rate anything that wrecked me this thoroughly anything less than a 5/5. I sort of feel like maybe I ought to. But I can't.
    • 3/5
      Relentlessly depressing. The question of inevitable destruction: what do humans do? Like many novels in this genre, you need to be in the right space emotionally to process this story as intended.
    • 4/5
      In Australia, residents await a wave of radiation that’s slowly been making its way south after the rest of the world participated in a nuclear World War III. Although the basis for the story is bleak, the humanity of the details makes this an incredibly personal read. It’s not about the bombs and the battles; it’s about the quiet personal moments between spouses and friends as they decide what to do with their remaining months of life. There’s poignancy in the futility of the little things, planting a garden, sewing a button and a jacket. Though there is technically no point in talking about the future, people can’t seem to help themselves. They worry about their children’s teething issues even though there’s a much worse fate in store for them. Most people continue to do the things that they love. I think what struck me the most about this book was the civility of people even though they knew what was coming. There was no murder and looting, instead the majority of the people continue their lives as normal, focusing a little more on family and leisure than they would have in everyday life. They knew it was coming, but that didn't change who they were as people. There were a few people who did things a bit more extreme, like racing at top speeds, because they had nothing to lose, but even those people did it in a structured way. The funny thing is, even though they know it’s the end of the world, they can’t help succumbing to normal things like falling in love. BOTTOM LINE: Beautiful and heartbreaking, this classic provides a look at society on the brink of extension. It took me a minute to embrace the style of storytelling, which felt a bit stilted, but after that I was sucked in. “If what they say is right we're none of us going to have time to do all that we planned to do. But we can keep on doing it as long as we can.”
    • 4/5
      The setting is 1963 in Melbourne, Australia and its surrounding towns, two years after a nuclear World War III. The radioactive fallout has been moving through the hemisphere killing all living things in its wake. Australia (which didn't participate in the war) and New Zealand are expected to be the last victims. This is an interesting look at how these last survivors cope with, or deny, what's coming and the choices they make about how to live out their last months.

      I really enjoyed this book, despite being distracted by the differences between life in 2013 and life as it was known by the author in 1957, when the book was published. Smoking on a submarine for example seemed so odd it completely pulled me out of the story for a bit. I knew nothing of this book when I chose it, expecting something more like A Town Like Alice. Despite my surprise, I found this book worthwhile and will read another Nevil Shute book. His portrayal of people is kind, yet realistic.
    • 4/5
      There has been a war. The northern hemisphere is a radioactive wasteland. Australia has survivors, but the radiation is heading their way.I laughed when it talked about making gas being too outrageously expensive to do - It would cost $2.00 a gallon!What would you do if you knew that come September everyone would be dead? Would go on pretending that it wasn't coming? Where would you want to be at the end?
    • 4/5
      My literary tastes lean more maximalist, and I have a more pessimistic view of humanity, so the fact that I enjoyed this understated novel about the last remaining survivors from a global nuclear apocalypse facing certain death was truly surprising. Like the radioactive dust that's circling the globe in a gentle death vise, Nevil Shute creates a tightly written novel about facing one's inevitable doom with dignity that's no less gripping. The fate of everyone in On the Beach is pretty much sealed from the get-go, and yet you can't help but root for them and admire their respect for each other and grace in facing the end until the very last page. It makes you think: what would you do if you only had a few more months after some global cataclysm? Would we all slide into one kind of Purge-esque carnal anarchy, or would we keep going about our business, doing the chores, and tending the gardens, and still being neighborly and kind? Shute shows us the possibility of the latter scenario and it's utterly believeable--even to this cynic. Not often you get such a chilling, dark premise in a book, and finish it feeling strangely uplifted.
    • 3/5
      I read this book without realising it was science fiction, which is a weird way to go about it, but that's just how it happened.

      This is set in a post-apocalyptic world (Melbourne, Australia, specifically). It was fascinating for me to read about a Melbourne I'd never been to - a Melbourne from the 1950's and 60's. Sparse, stark, a little bit dirty, a little bit worn around the edges, it's nothing like the young, complex, layered little city that I know today, full of little coffeeshops, boutiques, business centres and walls of graffiti.

      The writing style was very dark, very masculine, very slow-building. While I didn't necessarily like it, it held me in. I wanted to find out what happened. So I kept reading, and I kept reading.

      The plot in this story feels almost insidious, it creeps up on you. One of the main characters is genuinely just waiting for the end of the world, and so you just wait with him too.

      I'm giving this book 3 stars, but if you think this is the book for you, by all means, give it a go.
    • 4/5
      Another end-of-the-world book, it doesn't have the survival instinct of Alas Babylon or the civilization-starting-over theme of Earth Abides--everyone knows they're going to die and they do. The fact that they go about what's left of their lives with dignity (and some selective denial) only makes the end worse. Despite the foregone conclusion I found it impossible to put down.
    • 4/5
      A post-apocalyptic book club selection.

      What if the world ended in the 1950s?

      Well, Nevil Shute thinks everyone would've been in a state of near-total denial.

      Nuclear war has happened. A perfect storm of miscommunications, accidents, and the flaring up of old conflicts... The fallout is slowly, inexorably swirling around the globe. In Australia, a bunch of very British citizens (and one American Navy captain) know that everyone North of them is already dead or dying. There's a miniscule hope that predictions about how fast the fallout will dissipate are wrong - but, really, not much of one.

      So what do people do? Well, they drink a lot. They're quietly depressed. Some take up suicidal hobbies. But mostly, they pretend it's not going to happen. They garden. They have a lot of babies.

      Some people in my book club criticised the characters as not being very well-developed. It's true, they're more illustrations-of-type. It's not a character-driven book, but a philosophical musing on how people deal with the certain knowledge of approaching death.

      The degree of denial that Shute posits is, at first, hard to accept. But as it went on, I think he made a case. The mix of fatalism and banality he shows in this small society is well-crafted and illuminating both of the attitudes and fears of the 1950's, and of human psychology in general.

      A classic for a reason - I really enjoyed it.
    • 5/5
      Published in 1957, On the Beach is particularly relevant in modern times in the ever present global conflicts and every country's refusal to rule out nuclear strikes. The world is in turmoil following a nuclear war in the Northern Hemisphere and the air is polluted with radioactive fallout killing anyone it touches within a matter of days. As the earth's air currents slowly force the radiation South, this story concentrates on how southern Australian's react to their impending death, focusing mainly on five main characters. We are introduced to Peter and Mary, a young family; Dwight, a US navy captain; Moira, a young woman who drinks too much; and Julian, her cousin. They each have different coping mechanisms with how they deal with their eventual death.

      This novel may feel somewhat dated in the portrayal of its characters and their stoicism in the face of adversity, desperate hope, and resignation to the inevitable. The total self destruction of the human race would probably be much more horrible than the way it's portrayed in this book. It seems unbelievable that an entire community of people would face death with such an orderly sense of denial and detachment. I'm positive there would be looting and chaos in the streets if this had been written today. However, none of this detracts from the building hopelessness toward the inevitable conclusion. I found this was a book with a message: to raise awareness of the dangers of a nuclear war at a time when the costs of one were poorly understood. It continues to stay my mind long after I've finished reading. It's a timely novel and one that is both chilling and captivating.

      I took the opportunity when I was done with the book to watch the 1959 film starring Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, Fred Astaire and Anthony Perkins. I enjoyed having the benefit of more of the back story via the novel, but the film had a much more emotional impact for me than the book. I highly recommend them both.
    • 5/5
      Written in 1957, the novel starts some months after a nuclear war that wiped out all life in the Northern Hemisphere. The story takes place in Australia during the last months before the radiation reaches the country and wipes out all life. As they wait for the radiation to reach them in the vicinity of Melbourne, the three main protagonists of the story - tied together as key members of the crew of the last operational submarine - find their own way to deal with the reality of the situation.

      Though the overall the theme is very depressing - after all death for everybody is to be expected from the outset - I found the book in many ways uplifting. As it is said somewhere in the book, this outcome is really the same for all of us. The only difference here is in the knowing of the when and how. How we deal with life in the meantime is what counts. The book works well on both levels, telling the story of how the society as a whole deals with the reality of the coming end and the different ways individuals adopt to deal with it. I very much liked the fact that the book left out the immediate aftermath of the war where reactions would assuredly have been more violent, but rather looked at the last months, where people had already learned to deal with the new reality.
    • 4/5
      This post-apocalyptic novel was published in 1957 and set in the future – 1963 (though current readers might consider it “historical”). It takes place primarily in and around Melbourne Australia. World War has decimated the northern hemisphere a year or two previously, and the nuclear debris is slowly spreading on the winds to the southern hemisphere. The population knows that the end is coming; in about nine months they will all get radiation sickness and die. But for now … the sun shines, people go to work (albeit on horseback or via bicycle since they have no petrol), babies are born, children attend school, sports matches are played, beach and picnic outings are had … in short, life goes on.

      I cannot remember the last time I was so affected by a book. Part of my reaction, I’m sure, harkens back to my own days as a child during the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Cold War. I lived in a military town, and we felt we would be a prime target if bombs were launched against us. I remember the “duck and cover” drills, the discussions I had with my parents about what to do if “something happened” while I was at school. On a basic level, this book touched and awakened all those fears and insecurities.

      I’ve had dreams about the situation these characters find themselves in. What would I do if I knew I was going to die? Would I plant daffodil bulbs I’d never see flower? Would I start a new course of study I’d always wanted to pursue, knowing I’d never finish it and never be able to get a job in that career field? Would I abandon my duties and obligations to indulge in hobbies? Would I give up and seek the numbing effects of alcohol? Would I embrace the chance at a new love? Would I kill my baby or my elderly parents to ensure they didn’t suffer? Would I end it quickly or die a slow agonizing death, knowing my loved ones, friends, neighbors, countrymen were all dying similarly?

      It’s not a “teary” book, but I was in tears at the end. I’m really glad I finally read this book that has been on my tbr list for (literally) decades.
    • 4/5
      Well. That should have been an utterly depressing book - it starts with everyone knowing they're going to die, and no miracle appears to refute that. And it ends with every character we've met dying. And yet...somehow, as they individually work their way through this unwelcome knowledge, as they interact and make choices about how they're going to live while they still do, even as some of them reject the knowledge and pretend life will go on - it's not really sad. Strongly emotional, but not in the least sentimental, and they all make their choices in full knowledge - no one panics (that we see), they just go on until there's nowhere to go. I'm almost crying now, writing the review, but I didn't while reading the book; it seemed somehow inappropriate for me to cry for them. Very rich (well, it is a Nevil Shute, after all), chock-full of interesting characters and events. Definitely glad I read it. I can't help thinking of When the Wind Blows - kind of the same subject, but that one is full of pitiable characters helpless against events and is utterly depressing. Strange how this is so similar and so different.
    • 5/5
      After WW3, a group of Australians wait patiently for the radiation cloud, which has killed everyone else on the planet, to kill them too.
    • 4/5
      An interesting comparison with Day of the Triffids, which goes through contortions to reassure the reader that all will be well post-apocalypse, just watch out for the shrubbery. This revels in the crushing bleakness of a doomed society, where everyone is just rearranging the deckchairs as the boat goes down, and mentally working out how they're going to commit suicide.
    • 5/5
      Six-word review: Disturbing apocalyptic vision still delivers chills.Extended review:Like a number of other novels of Nevil Shute, On the Beach is a moving tale of ordinary people jolted out of the normal course of their lives and into something--this particular something very dark and troubling--that they must somehow face and cope with.Here, the Northern Hemisphere has been obliterated by nuclear war and its radioactive fallout, and weather patterns are inevitably carrying the lethal airborne particles southward. Australia is among the last places to be visited by the deadly cloud.The main characters are an Australian naval officer and his wife, an American captain of a submarine, and a young woman he meets in Melbourne. The story is set in 1963, a few years into the future from the time of its publication in 1957. I was a young schoolchild in 1957, and I remember having air raid drills in school--duck and cover, file out of the classroom in an orderly fashion and stand against your locker, get under something. Civil defense sirens were tested every week in our city, and every week the radio broadcast a test of a civil defense alert that would sound in the event of an emergency. In 1957, before Sputnik, before escalation of the war in Vietnam, before the Cuban missile crisis, there was the terror of the Cold War. Shute's imagined eruption of a third world war and its aftermath must have been all too plausible to those who had lived through World War II and found that the hoped-for era of peace had been dashed on the rocks of international politics. More than half a century later, it still resounds with a chilling relevance. At a time when the news is full of panicky, overreactive shootings of civilians by cops, of cops by civilians, and of civilians by civilians, it's easy enough to envision a chain of major events set off by accident, a series of mistakes compounding, with irrecoverable, irreversible global consequences. In the end, everybody pays--at the mercy of a natural process after all.What's so striking about this novelist's depiction of a world in its final stages is the relative calm of those who are facing it. There is little in the way of hysteria, and even denial seems for most to be a deliberate, conscious turning away from awareness rather than an inability to acknowledge what is about to occur. Seeming like madness at first, denial eventually becomes a saving grace. People appear to be able to hold two incompatible notions at the same time, acting as if the one were true even as they recognize the other.An important theme is the stabilizing effect of routine and structure. This appears to hold true across all social classes, from the habits of the distinguished retired gentlemen at the club to the tram driver who keeps showing up for work. Taking courses in skills that they will never use, harrowing fields that will never be planted, following the rules of professional conduct to the last even when there will never be any call to answer for breaking them: abiding within these principles points to the strength of an inner moral sensibility and the compelling power of human dignity that transcend the eradication of everything we are. There is no comforting sense that life goes on and that someone will remember us; there is no assurance of any future beyond one's own consciousness. And yet even on the last day someone is still buying garden furniture and putting out plantings that will bloom in the spring.That made some sense to me. I recalled that on the morning of 9/11/2001, I heard the news of the attacks in New York and Washington as I was getting ready for work on the West Coast. That morning my department director came around to our cubicles to see that everyone was okay. He told me, "Go home if that's what you need to do to take care of yourself." I said, "No, I need to be here doing normal stuff." Sticking to routine seemed to be a refuge, the closest thing to a feeling of safety that I could embrace on that horrifying day.Shute's gift for making his settings compellingly vivid, supported by technical details that make his stories sound like conscientiously recorded histories, provides a solid grounding in authenticity. As a result his fictions have the ring of truth even when impossibly set in a future time. This, his best-known novel, allows us to both picture and ponder the unthinkable, and the hope it leaves with us is that even in the face of the ultimate disaster our humanity might be the last thing to go. The novel doesn't explain the title, but Wikipedia does: the phrase "on the beach" is a Royal Navy term that means "retired from the Service."
    • 4/5
      Most of us have played the mental game, "What would I do if I only had a few months to live?" On the Beach postulates a variation: "What would you do if you knew the entire world had only a few months to live?" You would be faced with the knowledge that not only you would be gone, but also everyone you loved and everything you knew. No memory would remain that any of you had ever existed.

      The setting is Australia. About a year previously, a month-long nuclear war wiped out everyone in the Northern Hemisphere, and though no explosions occurred south of the equator, the resulting radiation is slowly swallowing the southern latitudes. How do the folks in the novel react? They seem to hit only two notes on Kubler-Ross' grief scale--with either denial or sober acceptance.

      Mostly, they carry on as they always had, making the best of their remaining days as they know the end is near. The book is punctuated by a number of ordinary conversations, e.g. about planting flowers, getting milk for the baby, keeping up life at the country club. When talk moves to the war, people mostly express puzzlement. Nobody really comprehends what it was all about: "It all started with Albania." But that's exactly the point. There is a backstory here that none of us really knows. People moved by nationalism or ideology set this disaster in place, and what does it all matter now? They themselves are all dead, and soon all these good common folks who just wanted to live their lives in peace will be dead too.

      So incredibly sad.
    • 4/5
      It is the 1960s (the book was written in 1957) in Australia. The “short war” was just over a month long. The result of that war: radiation all over the northern hemisphere that has killed everyone. That radiation is making its way south to envelope the planet. It was good. Most of the book, I'd actually rate “ok”, but the end really picked up, I thought, as the characters knew the end was coming. What would you do with the last months, weeks, and days of your life? I didn't like two of the main characters: Dwight and Moira. Well, I didn't mind Dwight as much, but I really didn't like Moira, so I wasn't nearly as interested in them. I liked Peter, Mary and Jennifer much more. But, there seemed to be more focus on Dwight and Moira, unfortunately for me. The ending upped my rating just a touch, though.