On the Beach

By: Nevil Shute

Narrated by: Simon Prebble

Length: 9 hrs and 24 mins

Publisher's summary

A war no one fully understands has devastated the planet with radioactive fallout from massive cobalt bombing. Melbourne, Australia, is the only area whose citizens have not yet succumbed to the contamination. But there isn’t much time left, a few months, maybe more—and the citizens of Melbourne must decide how they will live the remaining weeks of their lives, and how they will face a hopeless future.

Published in 1957, On the Beach is considered a classic nuclear holocaust novel, and a masterpiece of speculative fiction.

©1957 Nevil Shute Norway (P)1991 Recorded Books, LLC

You won't be able to put this down

The characters and their lives are described realistically, with compassion, attention to detail, and even humor. The story could happen as easily today as when the story was set over 50 years ago. It will give you a new perspective on your own life as you realize we could share the same fate today if we don't take nuclear disarmament seriously.

Possibly the bleakest book ever

Yes, it is bleak, but most of the bleakness is below the surface. Human nature dictates that most people will attempt to go on with their lives as best they can. Shute never lets go of that tension between bleakness and everyday life, yet there is very little preachiness in his telling. The behavior of the people in this situation feels right for the most part. Shute attempts to account for the range of possible reactions while keeping his cast of characters to a manageable size. I think by and large the population would react with the vague sense of unreality that he describes. Modern studies of people's reactions to major natural disasters bear him out on this. There are some very human and touching moments such as Commander Towers looking for presents for his children.

Shute also avoids trying to explain too much about how the world got into the situation presented in the book. The why is unimportant. The 1959 movie struggled with both the issue of a backstory and the preachiness aspect. I sympathize with the film maker's need for the ending to make more of a statement. As a thought experiment, I think Shute makes the wiser choice of leaving it up to the reader to ponder.

Life's A Beach

Would you listen to On the Beach again? Why?

I might play it again.

What did you like best about this story?

When the girl's bra fell off.

What about Simon Prebble’s performance did you like?

He did a good job.

If you were to make a film of this book, what would the tag line be?

If you only see one movie for the rest of your life....

Nothing like it

Absolute must read.

I just finished it and honestly i don't have the heart to say more. Devastating but beautiful.

Denial

That was the thing I found most difficult to take about this apocalyptic tale. It seems that many of the main characters sought refuge in pretending that what was happening, wasn’t. And “Uncle Sam wouldn’t like it” is a terrible way to reason when there is no Uncle Sam and the very last bastion of human civilization is about to pop off. That’s why you kept men and women apart on their last day of life? What a demented dweeb. I’m sure such staunch adherence to duty was comforting to men and women of the 1950s, however.

The book kept me interested and the narrator was excellent. I wasn’t sure a story set in Australia would hold my attention, but it did, right to the end. This novel does not compare to Alas,Babylon in my opinion. It does not have the intense level of detail and realism about the international conflict that led to nuclear destruction. The characters aren’t quite as mesmerizing, the end isn’t quite as soul shaking. There’s a tease in the Shute novel that keeps leading the reader to draw a different conclusion and while the tease isn’t quite fair it does work. Overall a good novel, but not a great one and not the best of the genre either. Liked, not loved.

This is what the very, very end looks like

i like books written from this time period. but with this one, given its premise, i could not help but wonder how it would end. but it just kept along its path, blending the mundane with the unimaginable--always warm and personal and convincingly real, always practical and reasonable--and kept marching toward the obvious and inevitable ending i thought was just too unthinkable to actually be the ending. but it was. and for that reason, and many others, i think this is the saddest book ive ever read. and certainly one i will not soon forget.

Sad ending

A touching performance,this sort of thing could very well happen in a world like ours. I took me a long time to finish this book.

Still great

I read this book in high school many years ago. It had a huge impact on my life... and still does.

The best "boring" book I've ever read/listened to

On the Beach is just...wow! I cried at the end. I never do that, no matter how sad a story is, but I genuinely cried at the end of this one. It's weird because I didn't find any of the characters to be particularly interesting, weird, eccentric, or "memorable" like characters from other books I've read/listened to. When compared to characters from other works, honestly you could say that the characters in this book were flat out "boring", but I think that's what made the books so powerful. The characters were "boring", but that just made them more relatable. Their relatability made the ending hit that much harder for me. I felt like I was watching my family, friends, neighbors, coworkers, etc. having to go through this situation instead of some "protagonist" or "antagonist" or fictional characters in general. This books was just so emotionally powerful. One of my favorite movies ever is Pirates of the Caribbean (the 1st one) and I love Captain Jack Sparrow, but he is way to interesting of a character to be relatable. The character is great, but I have simply never met anyone like Captain Jack Sparrow in real life. The character's in On the Beach, however, I could replace them all with people I interact with on a daily basis. Just because none of the characters are as interesting as Captain Jack Sparrow doesn't stop the book itself one of the best emotional experiences I have ever gotten from fiction.

A beautiful, sad, decent world

The performance is well done and doesn't detract from the story.

I know some think the book is overrated, slow. I'd say the slowness is part of the story, necessary.

The main thing I come away with from this book is that people can be decent with one another and that can still illicit true emotion.

Enjoy the book and don't be in a hurry.