It is many years since God sent the Tribulation to punish the forebears for their sins, and in the rural settlement of Waknuk David Strorm’s father decries any and all blasphemies against nature. Little does he realise that David and his cousin Rosalind, have their own secret aberration which would label them as mutants. But as they grow older it becomes more difficult to conceal their differences from the village elders. Soon they face a choice: wait for eventual discovery, or flee to the terrifying and mutable Badlands.
John Wyndham’s THE CHRYSALIDS anticipates and surpasses many of today’s dystopian thrillers….The Chrysalids explores intolerance and bigotry with satisfying complexity as it races toward an ending that is truly unpredictable. The Seattle Times
One of the most thoughtful post-apocalypse novels ever written. Wyndham was a true English visionary, a William Blake with a science doctorate. David Mitchell
Sometimes you just need a bit of soft-core sci-fi, and Wyndham’s 1950′s classic, newly back in print, fully delivers. Thicket Magazine
It is quite simply a page-turner, maintaining suspense to the very end and vividly conjuring the circumstances of a crippled and menacing world, and of the fear and sense of betrayal that pervade it. The ending, a salvation of an extremely dubious sort, leaves the reader pondering how truly ephemeral our version of civilization is. The Boston Globe
Absolutely and completely brilliant…THE CHRYSALIDS is a top-notch piece of sci-fi that should be enjoyed for generations yet to come. The Ottawa Citizen
RE-BIRTH (THE CHRYSALIDS) was one of the first science fiction novels I read as a youth, and several times tempted me to take a piggy census. Returning to it now, more than 30 years later, I find that I remember vast parts of it with perfect clarity…a book to kindle the joy of reading science fiction. SciFi.com
A remarkably tender story of a post-nuclear childhood…It has, of course, always seemed a classic to most of its three generations of readers…It has become part of a canon of good books. The Guardian
