The Midwich Cuckoos

Title: The Midwich Cuckoos

Author: John Wyndham

Number of pages: 224

Started: 18 April 2008

Finished: 21 April 2008

Opening words:

One of the luckiest accidents in my wife's life is that she happened to marry a man who was born on the 26th of September. But for that, we should both of us undoubtedly have been at home in Midwich on the night of the 26th-27th, with consequences which, I have never ceased to be thankful, she was spared.

Plot summary:

Cuckoos lay eggs in other birds' nests. The clutch that was fathered on the quiet little village of Midwich, one night in September, proved to possess a monstrous will of its own. Imt promised to make the human race look as dated as the dinosaur.

Plot summary taken from Amazon

What I thought:

I liked this book. It had quite an intriguing and mysterious plot and did John Wyndham’s usual thing of turning ordinary lives into something so much more than that. It did make the thought go through my mind several times about what would we do if we were faced with a scenario like that, would we all just want to think that these were people that were a bit ‘different’ or would we consider that it was something more sinister than that an what difficult decisions would we be willing to make in order to deal with it.

None of the Wyndham books I have read have been as good as The Day of the Triffids, but they are always thought provoking reads.