🌟 "On the Beach" by Nevil Shute

A nuclear war wipes out all inhabitants of the northern hemisphere and leaves behind a radioactive cloud that's slowly making its way over to the southern hemisphere. We follow a few people in Australia, waiting for the cloud to reach them, not quite sure whether their lives will truly be ending. I loved my time with this book. I believe On the Beach walked so Jacqueline Harpman's I Who Have Never Known Men could run. There's a great balance between following very personal stories in a world that keeps getting emptier, and a broader sense of confusion about what humanity did that it had to get to this point. There's also exploration of desolate areas, something that I like reading about very much. For me it combines two sides of the same uncanny coin: nostalgia and comfort on one side, and eeriness and dread on the other. The book was written in the 1950s, so the gender dynamics are somewhat old-fashioned, but nothing that bothered me too much. Characters are confused, silly,…