Cicely Hamilton 3 hr 55 min read

Comfortable civil servant Theodore Savage is a man made by his surroundings, until a devastating modern war shatters civilization and hurls him into a brutal, savage struggle to survive.

Cicely Hamilton's 1922 novel is a powerful, sobering post-apocalyptic classic. Bleak, prophetic, superbly told. Read it for a landmark British disaster novel, a chilling vision of technological war collapsing society into barbarism, seen through one ordinary man's fall from comfort to savagery, in an early and profoundly pessimistic warning about progress and its ruin.

In its time

Published in 1922, during the 1920s, the pulp era proper.

Reading it

3 hr 55 min read (a novel-length work, settle in).