Not the first time I've read this, it's been a favourite of mine since I watched the TV adaptation (when I was probably far too young for it!)

This story is seventy years old now, and it does show its age. There's a casual sexism that lingers nastily throughout the book, and I'd never really noticed before just how many times Wyndham tells us that Bill pauses to smoke a cigarette. We're very used to stories of the apocalypse now, so the way the story is told feels quite strange, lots of it is just Bill thinking through his situation and musing on what will happen to him now. I'd also forgotten just how quickly everything happens in the opening -within a couple of days of the start, everyone's planning for their brave new world and triffids are removing all non-essential characters from the story.

But despite that datedness, I still find it fascinating as it's laying out the forms of a new genre in a similar way to its American contemporary, Earth Abides. It's setting out an apocalypse that appears to be entirely human-created, even if it is accidental, and wrestling with the consequences of that. In the wake of WW2, this was still something new and terrifying so Wyndham is working out the ways in which that might happen be it genetic engineering, greed or satellite weapons that bring us down. Do read this to get an indication of how people approached this sort of thing in the 50s (with all the good and bad that implies) but don't expect it to be a conventional post-apocalyptic tale.