Day of the Triffids - John Wyndham

Cracking survivalist adventure yarn in the H.G. Wells idiom, with an added flavour of cold war paranoia. The opening is particularly strong, in which Our Hero awakes from a stay in hospital to find that the world as he knew it has been destroyed by weird intelligent plants. I was particularly intrigued by the constant warnings not to expect the Americans to get a beleaguered Britain out of trouble, and some very 1950s pushing of the sexual envelope in the depiction of the love affair. The ending is perhaps a little weak, but a fine novel nevertheless.