I ordered this a week or so ago and it came yesterday. Looking forward to cracking it open. 
Looking forward to discussing it with you, if you like. 
I think part of what really struck me about the book is the contrasts between how small the nuclear exchange was, and how much damage it did, and how people are still just living their lives and getting on with things.
ETA: I’m re-reading “Lucifer’s Hammer” now thanks to this thread.
It would have been more believable if the aftermath had been a bio warfare situation, rather than nuclear. An Australian aquaintance once noted that it had more to do with the pysch undertones in Australia of the time, than anything to do with nuclear warfare.
A national mental snapshot if you will.
Declan
I’m nearly finished, about 40 pages left. I’ve enjoyed it, hence the pace at which I’ve read it. It’s not perfect but still I found it rather rivetting. I’ll put my comments in a spoiler in case there are people who want to read it. I doubt anything I’ve written would ruin the book but anyway:
I felt the less is more approach was much more effective. The young kids giving their accounts of life post-war in Kansas were better imho than most of the adult accounts given and I felt nearly all the official documents given were unnecessary and hard to slog through. Some of the voices seemed real, others less so. I thought the post-war situation was really interesting, with only a few flaws. It’s interesting to a read the book as a satire of American fears in the mid-'80s. I dunno if I’m reading into it wrong but it suggests that there was a fear of Japanese technological domination and (what else is new?) a fear of Hispanic migration. There’s also a vaguely anti-California vibe to proceedings.
I wouldn’t argue with any of your spoilered ideas. The “less is more” approach is a good way to put it - there was a lot left unspoken in the book that you had to figure out on your own. I would say that came from the first conceit of the book - that it is written in a future where the limited nuclear war has happened, and the narrator assumes his audience knows the same things he does.
The technique is something I’ve only ever read before in Phillip Roth’s The Plot Against America, placing a narrator with the author’s own name in the alternate history. In both instances I found myself wondering, what, if anything the authors said was true of their own lives. A quick googling suggests they did draw on their own real lives up to the fictional point.
Another vague gripe, I think it was way too soon for new technologies to be present. It’s implied that the British and Japanese have all these amazing technologies. Ok, they weren’t directly hit but they would still have suffered in some way during such a conflict. It’s funny how some of the technologies they describe fit in with technologies we have now. There’s allusions to flatscreen tellies, digital cameras, and the author getting a hard-on over some Apple tech.
When the Wind Blows anyone?
I’ve seen it and loved it. Very, very sad.
Excellent book.
Just out in paperback is Steven Amsterdam’s Things We Didn’t See Coming, which I liked. It’s episodes in (possibly) one person’s life as the collapse comes, and society mutates and eventually re-emerges. Somewhat similar in form is Soft Apocalypse by Will McIntosh, also just out in softcover.
The Committed Men by M.John Harrison was also mentioned; I re-read it a few years ago and felt it still held up well.
Another interesting British one is The Death of Grass by John Christopher. Grasses and grains all start dying off, and food rapidly becomes scarce… The characters are much more realistic in their actions than the ones in The Day of the Triffids, a much more famous Britich catastrophe book of the same time.
In the short term maybe, but IIRC in the story the event happened years previously. Why’s he still wandering around the nullwastes of Pennsylvania (or wherever)?
For the cannibalism as portrayed to make sense then the “prey” have to be getting food from somewhere. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s a fantastically written book but I don’t think, and I don’t think he cared to put, his characters in a realistic, natural setting.
Carol Amen’s short story The Last Testament, which was adapted into the movie Testament.
To this day it remains the only movie ever to upset my wife so much she walked out of it.