A Time for Survival

A Time for Survival is a novel by the English writer Philip McCutchan, published in 1966.

The book is one of a large group of British novels written in that decade about what would be left after a nuclear exchange, and its interest is in the small group rather than the catastrophe: the shelter, the decision to leave it, the walk through a country with no services, and the problem of two people and a baby who cannot go back. On the road they meet a single other survivor, a naval radio artificer who drinks and lives hard, and the novel uses him to complete a triangle of the kind that such stories usually avoid, which is what gives the book its particular pressure. McCutchan wrote a great many novels in several genres, most of them about ships and the sea, and this one puts his knowledge of engines and naval procedure to work in a ruined country. The result is a survival story that is more interested in rationing, discipline and leadership than in spectacle.