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On the Beach

Nevil Shute · back to the book

What’s in it

Tap a tag: ❤ = this matters to me · tap again ✕ = don’t care · again to reset. The list below updates each time.

24 books with the same feel

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❤️

One Second After

William R. Forstchen · 352 pages

*New York Times* best selling author William R. Forstchen now brings us a story which can be all too terrifyingly real...a story in which one man struggles to save his family and his small North Carolina town after America loses a war, in one second, a war that will send America back to the Dark Ages... A war based upon a weapon, an Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP). A weapon that may already be in the

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Warday

Whitley Strieber, James W. Kunetka · 447 pages

Riveting account of a limited nuclear war between the US and the USSR and what came after.

Nuclear DisasterPost-ApocalypticBleakNear Future
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Station Eleven

Emily St. John Mandel · 352 pages

One snowy night Arthur Leander, a famous actor, has a heart attack onstage during a production of "King Lear." Jeevan Chaudhary, a paparazzo-turned-EMT, is in the audience and leaps to his aid. A child actress named Kirsten Raymonde watches in horror as Jeevan performs CPR, pumping Arthur's chest as the curtain drops, but Arthur is dead. That same night, as Jeevan walks home from the theater, a te

Post-ApocalypticNear FutureSlow-PacedBittersweet
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The Last Man

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley · 362 pages

Mary Shelley, the author of [*Frankenstein*][1], wrote the apocalyptic novel The Last Man in 1826. Its first person narrative tells the story of our world standing at the end of the twenty-first century and - after the devastating effects of a plague - at the end of humanity. In the book Shelley writes of weaving this story from a discovery of prophetic writings uncovered in a cave near Naples. Th

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A Canticle for Leibowitz

Walter M. Miller Jr. · 320 pages

Highly unusual After the Holocaust novel. In the far future, 20th century texts are preserved in a monastery, as "sacred books". The monks preserve for centuries what little science there is, and have saved the science texts and blueprints from destruction many times, also making beautifully illuminated copies. As the story opens to a world run on a basically fuedal lines, science is again beco

Nuclear DisasterPost-ApocalypticBleakScience Fiction
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The Age of Miracles

Karen Thompson Walker · 304 pages

The coming-of-age story of young Julia, whose world is thrown into upheaval when it is discovered that the Earth's rotation has suddenly begun to slow, posing a catastrophic threat to all life.

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Alas, Babylon

Pat Frank · 295 pages

A story of a group of people who rely on their own courage and ingenuity to survive in a town which escaped nuclear bombing.

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The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

Carson McCullers · 334 pages

Set in 1930s Georgia, the novel centers around a deaf and mute man, John Singer. Singer has been devastated by the loss of his dear friend, Antonapoulos, who was committed to an asylum for bad behavior

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There Will Come Soft Rains

Ray Bradbury · 30 pages

Also known as August 2026: There Will Come Soft Rains, is a short story narrating the daily routine of an automated house, whose menial tasks continue, unimpeded for now, in the solitary aftermath of a worldwide nuclear holocaust. This story was written in 1950 during a period known as the Cold War, a conflict mostly devoid of overt military action that took place between the United States and

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Swan Song

Robert McCammon · 956 pages

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Down to a Sunless Sea

David Graham

Review:This book was published in 1981 so is a little dated but well worth reading and very frightening. A post-apocalyptic novel about a planeload of people during and after a short nuclear war, set in a near-future world where the USA is critically short of oil. The title of the book is taken from a line of the poem Kubla Khan by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

Nuclear DisasterPost-ApocalypticBleakNear Future
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The Grapes of Wrath

John Steinbeck · 553 pages

Steinbeck’s classic novel of the Great Depression is as vivid now as ever. The story focuses on a family of Oklahoma sharecroppers, farmers who work another man’s land for a share of the crops. Driven from their home by drought and poverty they take to the road in a battered old truck and make their way to California to look for work. When they arrive they find hundreds of others like them being f

BleakTragicSlow-PacedCharacter-Driven
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When the Wind Blows

Raymond Briggs · 46 pages

Raymond Briggs' now famous bestselling comic cartoon book depicts the effects of a nuclear attack on an elderly couple in his usual humorous yet macabre way.

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Out of the Dust

Karen Hesse · 235 pages

"Dust piles up like snow across the prairie. . . ." A terrible accident has transformed Billie Jo's life, scarring her inside and out. Her mother is gone. Her father can't talk about it. And the one thing that might make her feel better -- playing the piano -- is impossible with her wounded hands. To make matters worse, dust storms are devastating the family farm and all the farms nearby. Wh

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The Handmaid's Tale

Margaret Atwood · 352 pages

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Blindness

Jose Saramago · 327 pages

A city is struck by an epidemic of "white blindness." The first man to succumb sits in his car, waiting for the light to change. He is taken to an eye doctor, who does not know what to make of the phenomenon - and soon goes blind himself. The blindness spreads, sparing no one. Authorities confine the blind to a vacant mental hospital secured by armed guards under instructions to shoot anyone tryi

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Stoner

John Williams · 278 pages

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The Plague

Albert Camus · 278 pages

The Plague (French: La Peste) is a novel by Albert Camus, published in 1947, that tells the story of a plague sweeping the French Algerian city of Oran. It asks a number of questions relating to the nature of destiny and the human condition. The characters in the book, ranging from doctors to vacationers to fugitives, all help to show the effects the plague has on a populace.

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Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Tennessee Williams · 158 pages

Members of a neurotic Southern family gather to face the impending death of their patriarch, Big Daddy, and battle over the inheritance of his vast estate.

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Level 7

Mordecai Roshwald · 189 pages

A chillingly calm first person account of Armageddon, from the point of view of a low-level military functionary. This account should make you think, and should terrify you.

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A Gift Upon the Shore

M.K. Wren · 374 pages

In the Pacific Northwest of the near future, the golden age has ended in apocalypse. Nuclear war has unleased firestorms and the killing cold of nuclear winter. Earthquakes and tidal waves have ravaged the West Coast of America. Desperate violent looters comb the devastated land. And a horrifying pandemic lays waste to the remaining human population. But one of the few survivors, Mary Hope, is det

Nuclear DisasterPost-ApocalypticSlow-PacedCharacter-Driven
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A Farewell to Arms

Ernest Hemingway · 332 pages

A Farewell to Arms is about a love affair between the expatriate American Henry and Catherine Barkley against the backdrop of the First World War, cynical soldiers, fighting and the displacement of populations. The publication of A Farewell to Arms cemented Hemingway's stature as a modern American writer, became his first best-seller, and is described by biographer Michael Reynolds as "the premier

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Earth Abides

George R. Stewart · 368 pages

The story of rebuilding civilization after a plague nearly wipes out the human race.

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Never Let Me Go

Kazuo Ishiguro · 288 pages

Ishiguro explores what it means to have a soul and how art distinguishes man from other life forms. But above all, *Never Let Me Go* is a study of friendship and the bonds we form which make or break while we come of age.

TragicSlow-PacedCharacter-DrivenBittersweet

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