The Day of the Triffids

The Day of the Triffids is a post-apocalyptic novel by the English writer John Wyndham, published in 1951. Its catastrophe arrives in two parts: a meteor shower that most of the world watches and that leaves the watchers blind, and the triffids, tall plants with a sting that people had been cultivating for their oil and that had escaped into the wild in the years before.

Bill Masen is in hospital with his eyes covered when the shower happens, which is why he can still see. He makes his way through a London that has stopped working, finds other survivors, and has to work out how a small group can live in a country where the triffids now move freely and where the remaining population needs feeding and defending.

Wyndham had already published a novel before this one, and this book made his name as a writer of careful catastrophes, in which a single change is followed through into the ordinary arrangements of daily life. It is one of the best-known English disaster novels.