'Sorry I couldn't get down to the beach'

If there is a lesson to Nevil Shute's On the Beach, at least, of the copy we have at home, it is the cliché, 'don't judge a book by its cover'. Because the copy I am reading from is dreadful to behold: a garish orange publication by Pan Books, with a naval man clutching a desperate woman (both drawn in that awful late sixties realist style) and, on the back, the whole story compressed into an unfeeling paragraph just to sell it.

The original book was published in 1957, so the events it portrays would have been, for its first readers, speculative fiction about the future, for it occurs sometime in the early sixties. The Pan Books edition I have (from which page citations are taken), was first published in 1966 and had reached a fourth printing in 1969, indicative of the book's popularity at the time.