Mixed Pickles - the Book log 2012

I said I was going on a John Christopher jag,
and with two down, I don't think that it was a bad decision at all. 

TDoG is a great British post-apocalypse novel.  Imagine "Day of the Triffids" but without a happy ending.  The speed with which Christopher's characters devolve from middle-class civility into a neo-feudalism is both astonishing and completely believable.  The premise is simple, and all to realistic - a virus attacks and destroys all forms of grass, including the members of the genus that provide our daily bread.  A middle class engineer sets out with his family to escape London and the coming civil disturbance, and join his brother on a farm in the North of England where they believe they will be safe.  He takes with him a small assortment of people - his friend and bridge opponent (funny how bridge is seen as a symbol of civilisation in the face of calamitous upheaval;  see Robert A. Heinlein's "Farnham's Freehold" for another example), a semi-abaonded schoolboy, and an ageing gun-dealer and his loose-moraled wife.

One hundred and ninety four pages, and a few days later (Christopher is wonderfully economical with his prose and his timelines) everything in their lives has changed.  Don't go into this novel expecting "classic science fiction" - it is, instead, a novel which shows how ordinary people respond to extraordinary circumstances and you find yourself asking "Would I do the same things if I were in their position?"

Unputdownability :  You have to pause for breath regularly.