The World in Winter

Book Details:

Hardback edition published by Eyre and Spottiswoode, London, 1962. First Edition.

Sleeve notes:

The winter was extraordinarily severe. In London the Thames froze and the whole of Europe lay under snow. When the spring should have come the terrible cold persisted, not just in Europe but all over the Northern hemisphere, and even those with no access to official secrets could see what was coming. Nothing could save the crops on which half the world depended. Famine and cold would quickly lead to the breakdown of all order and out of the holocaust only a few people could hope to survive.

Andrew Leedon was among the lucky ones able to escape to Nigeria before the end came, among the flood of refugees who became the new poor of Africa. It is from there that he returns to the desolate snow-fields of England where the climax of the story takes place.

John Christopher is a master of this kind of story-telling. In his hands a strange world comes terribly alive, with every detail as sharp as the nightmare. The starving mob of London, the inverted society of Lagos where the white people find themselves living as only the black have lived before, the return to a Europe where the unending miles of snow desert are landmarked only by ruined towns and the bodies of the dead - the book is full of such scenes that no one who reads it will forget.

Since H.G. wells there have been few writers with so great a command of such ‘tales of the imagination’ as John Christopher. This is his most exciting and memorable book.

Book Source:

Book Details:

Paperback edition published by Sphere Books, London, 1979 reprint.

Sleeve notes:

The big freeze . . .

It was the worst winter in recorded history. But it was only the start of the numbing horror that soon gripped the world in its frozen claw. A new ice age had begun . . . .

The industrial nations, blessed until now with temperate climates, found their whole way of life dramatically upset. Those who could raced desperately for refuge in Africe, South America - wherever warmth vital for life remained. For thjose left behind in the freezing wastelands which had once held the world's wealth, the struggle for survival grew grimmer and grimmer. As the long winter ground on, there was a lot of blood upon the snow . . . .

John Christopher's literally chilling novel of climatic terror will simultaneously fascinate and frighten the reader. At a time when the world's climate has never behaved in a more unstable way, The World In Winter could be uncannily accurate prophecy of the day after tomorrow.

Book Source:

Book Details:

Hardback edition published by Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1964.

Sleeve notes:

An arctic winter - a winter like early 1963 - gradually ushers in the Ice Age. As the freezing truth dawns on them, people begin to move south from Europe to Africa. Anarchy in England . . . and London, with its belt drawn tightly in, beseiged by desperate packs of men. Such is the setting for this cold, cold nightmare by John Christopher - a setting as plausible as that for The Death of Grass.

Andrew Leedon thought himself lucky to reach Nigeria, until he found the plight of poor whites in a militant Africa as harsh as any Ice Age. Eventually he joins a Nigerian expeditionary force, bound by hovercraft for England, and this story of climatic horror and racial hatred culminates in a pitched battle on the frozen Thames.

Book Source:

Book Details:

Paperback edition published by Crest Books, New York, 1962?

Sleeve notes:

The Long Winter is a terrorizing story of what happens when a new Ice Age devastates the Northern Hemisphere, when civilization disappears into a voiceless polar night, when men and women turn into human wolf packs in the agonized struggle for survival . . . and when the only place left to run is filled with another kind of death.

Book Source: