| ||||||||||||||||||||||||
 Trade In this Item for up to £1.85
Get an extra £5 when you trade in books worth £10 or more until June 30, 2012. Trade in A Wrinkle in the Skin for an Amazon.co.uk gift card of up to £1.85, which you can then spend on millions of items across the site. Trade-in values may vary (terms apply). Find more products eligible for trade-in.
|
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
More About the Author
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
49 of 51 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
John Christopher has written several novels of global catastrophe,of which this is certainly the best.
The basic premise is that of extreme earthquakes on a worldwide scale, which reduce towns and cities to piles of rubble and plunge the survivors straight back into the Stone Age. Much of western Europe is drastically uplifted, transforming the English Channel into a muddy desert overnight - whist elsewhere, lands are thrown down and drowned under inrushing seas.
The cataclysm and its aftermath are seen from the viewpoint of Matthew Cotter, a Gurnsey horticulturalist who finds himself one of a handful left alive on the former island. The future they face, attempting to begin life again with what they can scavenge amid the devastation, seems hard and uncertain enough.
Matthew then treks across the empty seabed to England, in the faint hope that his student daughter has also survived. He finds the situation far worse in a wider land, with many competing bands of scavengers. Pillage, rape and murder are now the norm as mankind revets to utter barbarism.
The actual scientific likelihood of such immense convulsions in the Earth is very doubtful, and the author's explanation - as a new mountain-building episode - is certainly nonsense, since such events take tens of millions of years. The sheer dramatic impact of a global earthquake, however, makes this book greatly entertaining for all but the most pedantic.
Its central emphasis is on the reactions of people, totally unprepared, who see their world turned (almost literally) upside down and everyone they knew destroyed. While some find natural strength and determination, even leadership, others respond with violence, with apathy and despair, or retreat into lunacy. John Christopher displays a subtle and far-ranging mastery of characterisation. He has created a stark and very believable vision of human struggles to survive in a world made suddenly strange, lawless, primitive and hostile.
It might have been even better to see Matthew Cotter and others ten or twenty years on, after the barbaric majority had mostly starved or slain each other and nature had begun to reclaim the shattered country. Would naval vessels have survived in mid-ocean and acted as nuclei for new communities? Or would the fallout from wrecked nuclear power stations have caused widespread cancers, sterility, mutations - and ultimately lethal new diseases, which would finish off the human race?
This is, surely, the essence of "thought-provoking" literature.
Regardless of unanswered questions, I would rate "A Wrinkle in the Skin" as being among the finest pieces of speculative fiction I have read.
The basic premise is that of extreme earthquakes on a worldwide scale, which reduce towns and cities to piles of rubble and plunge the survivors straight back into the Stone Age. Much of western Europe is drastically uplifted, transforming the English Channel into a muddy desert overnight - whist elsewhere, lands are thrown down and drowned under inrushing seas.
The cataclysm and its aftermath are seen from the viewpoint of Matthew Cotter, a Gurnsey horticulturalist who finds himself one of a handful left alive on the former island. The future they face, attempting to begin life again with what they can scavenge amid the devastation, seems hard and uncertain enough.
Matthew then treks across the empty seabed to England, in the faint hope that his student daughter has also survived. He finds the situation far worse in a wider land, with many competing bands of scavengers. Pillage, rape and murder are now the norm as mankind revets to utter barbarism.
The actual scientific likelihood of such immense convulsions in the Earth is very doubtful, and the author's explanation - as a new mountain-building episode - is certainly nonsense, since such events take tens of millions of years. The sheer dramatic impact of a global earthquake, however, makes this book greatly entertaining for all but the most pedantic.
Its central emphasis is on the reactions of people, totally unprepared, who see their world turned (almost literally) upside down and everyone they knew destroyed. While some find natural strength and determination, even leadership, others respond with violence, with apathy and despair, or retreat into lunacy. John Christopher displays a subtle and far-ranging mastery of characterisation. He has created a stark and very believable vision of human struggles to survive in a world made suddenly strange, lawless, primitive and hostile.
It might have been even better to see Matthew Cotter and others ten or twenty years on, after the barbaric majority had mostly starved or slain each other and nature had begun to reclaim the shattered country. Would naval vessels have survived in mid-ocean and acted as nuclei for new communities? Or would the fallout from wrecked nuclear power stations have caused widespread cancers, sterility, mutations - and ultimately lethal new diseases, which would finish off the human race?
This is, surely, the essence of "thought-provoking" literature.
Regardless of unanswered questions, I would rate "A Wrinkle in the Skin" as being among the finest pieces of speculative fiction I have read.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I think that John Christopher is a forgotten gem of an author and never got the credit in the 'post apocalypse' genre I think he deserves
In this story a series of earthquakes devastate the world and the story is about one man and his efforts to survive and find his daughter
The story starts on Gurnsey and after a fairly slow start he sets off for the UK mainland across the sea bed that has been revealed as the sea was drained away by the changes set off by the earthquake
There is the usual cast of 'bad people' who treat this as an opportunity to behave very badly, a group of respectable people who are just trying to survive and the realisation that life will never be the same is well done as it dawns on them just what this means - and no help will be arriving
The way people might deal with this type of event is really well done, particularly the ships captain who has power and food and watches films at night , heckling the screen as it runs
The best part for me and where you get the scale of the events is where he gets to the top of hill near Brighton and the land has gone completely and it covered by sea - effectively ending his chance to find his daughter and then forcing him to deal with the whole situation
The realisation that a young lad now depends on him is brutally driven home and there is a nice twist in the tale as well
A very good story - well up to a usual high standard
In this story a series of earthquakes devastate the world and the story is about one man and his efforts to survive and find his daughter
The story starts on Gurnsey and after a fairly slow start he sets off for the UK mainland across the sea bed that has been revealed as the sea was drained away by the changes set off by the earthquake
There is the usual cast of 'bad people' who treat this as an opportunity to behave very badly, a group of respectable people who are just trying to survive and the realisation that life will never be the same is well done as it dawns on them just what this means - and no help will be arriving
The way people might deal with this type of event is really well done, particularly the ships captain who has power and food and watches films at night , heckling the screen as it runs
The best part for me and where you get the scale of the events is where he gets to the top of hill near Brighton and the land has gone completely and it covered by sea - effectively ending his chance to find his daughter and then forcing him to deal with the whole situation
The realisation that a young lad now depends on him is brutally driven home and there is a nice twist in the tale as well
A very good story - well up to a usual high standard
11 of 12 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
If you like stories where characters hold your interest because there is a clear narrative thread in operation then this if for you. Ignore any lazy comparisons with Wyndham as this is clearly superior to much of that (I loved Day of the Triffids but lets be fair the plot is nonsense!). This forms part of a themed trilogy of mankinds reaction to disaster (along with The World in Winter and Death of Grass) - it's clear that the author believes that instinct will drive us to barbarism but is optimistic that people will adapt and still retain their humanity.
Would you like to see more reviews about this item?
Were these reviews helpful?
Let us know
Most Recent Customer Reviews
Brilliant
Other reviews have gone into what the storyline is. All I have to say is that it is another John Christopher gem. Read more
Published 9 months ago by Jo
Science Fiction in Guernsey?
I owned a bookshop in Guernsey and have a large library and I was so pleased to find what must be the only science fiction book based mainly in Guernsey. Read more
Published 13 months ago by Jerz Jurkiewicz
a good read
I think this is my favourite one of this writer. Good scenario and some good thoughts on how people might react to such a situation.
Published 14 months ago by Robert Comerford
Yet another enjoyable "cosy catastrophe"
As was fashionable amongst British sci-fi authors of his generation (much of John Wyndham's work is fairly similar) this is a tale of a world-ending catastrophe, whose protagonist... Read more
Published on 28 Mar 2010 by D. R. Cantrell
A good read
This is a good read. It's an enjoyable rather than thought-provoking vision of a post-apocalyptic world. Read more
Published on 8 May 2009 by D. P. Mankin
Interesting period piece
John Christopher is a funny writer - his books have stuck in my mind and stayed with me for a long, long time - from childhood. Read more
Published on 3 April 2006 by Booksthatmatter
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
