Second paragraph of third chapter:

He turned from that at last, and made his way back inland. He felt empty and light-headed. He supposed he should try to find something to eat—it must be late morning, and he had vomited up the few sardines he had had. But the hunger which had been ravenous then was as markedly absent now. The feeling was something like drunkenness: he contemplated his state with mingled pity and grandeur. The last man left alive? The Robinson Crusoe of planet Earth? It might be so. The silence went on, and the sky stayed blue and vacant.

I had read this as a teenager, and spotted it in Buxton and decided to return to it. I feel it’s an overlooked classic, probably due to the success of the same author’s more optimistic The Death of Grass from a few years earlier.

The premise is that massive global earthquakes destroy civilisation; our protagonist finds himself one of the few survivors on Guernsey, and sets off on a quest to find his daughter in Sussex, made easier by the fact that the English Channel is now dry.

The depiction of the devastated landscape is vivid, but even more so the portrayal of a human society which has degenerated into straggling groups of survivors perpetrating rape and pillage on each other. It does take us some time before we meet a convincing woman character, and there’s a bit of a sense that the worst of the disaster is that the comfortable middle classes have been eradicated, leaving the world to the yobs, but all the same it’s a memorable picture. There were lines that I remembered well from thirty-plus years ago, and there are striking images that will linger with me for a long time.

You can get A Wrinkle in the Skin here.