THE CHRYSALIDS
by John Wyndham

  • I read it between Jul 1 & 6, 2016
  • Genre: SCIENCE FICTION

I wish I’d written this ...

... because it's evocative and has a sprinkling of magic!

I was surprised to discover that I’d never read this before. I thought I’d devoured everything Wyndham wrote. I have no idea how I managed to overlook it, and I’m sad that I did, because I have the feeling that if I’d read this during my teens it would have become one of those novels that sticks in the memory with a sprinkling of magic. It may well be the author’s best, hard to put down, effortlessly increasing my reading speed. True, the fact that its narrator begins as a child and is a young adult by the end makes it feel a little like a novel aimed at teens, but there’s plenty to chew on as an adult, and the theme of religious intolerance remains a sadly pertinent one. Great stuff.

From the publisher

A world paralysed by genetic mutation

John Wyndham takes the reader into the anguished heart of a community where the chances of breeding true are less than fifty per cent and where deviations are rooted out and destroyed as offences and abominations.

From the novel





About Mark Hodder

Mark Hodder is the author of the Philip K. Dick Award-winning novel THE STRANGE AFFAIR OF SPRING HEELED JACK and its sequels, and of the first officially sanctioned Sexton Blake novel to have been published in nearly half a century (he created and maintains BLAKIANA: The Sexton Blake Resource). He also writes short stories, flash fiction and vignettes. Find out more on his Patreon page. Mark was born in the UK but currently lives in Valencia, Spain, with his partner and two children.

Back