Dwight, however, is loyal to his wife and children in Connecticut – despite knowing that everyone in the Northern Hemisphere is dead, Dwight pretends his family is still alive, even buying his dead children presents. After returning home, Dwight and Moira become friends Moira begins to fall in love with Dwight. As they travel around Australia, scouting, the crew finds only one living creature – a single dog on the beach.
The crew only seems to know cursory details about the events leading up to the detonation: Albania started an Arab-Israeli war, which led to war between Russia and NATO, and finally between Russia and China. On board, they discuss some of the details of the war, of which there is no written account – it is not entirely clear who fired the final bomb that destroyed the world. At Peter's house, Dwight meets Moira Davis, a young woman who drinks to cope with her despair over losing the chance at the life she always imagined.Īfter the weekend, Peter, Dwight, and scientist Josh Osbourne, along with other crewmembers, set off on their Australia coastal cruise.
Peter invites Dwight to his home in Falmouth, near Melbourne, where they spend the weekend before taking an eleven-day trip around the coast of northern Australia looking for signs of life. The only problem is the lack of fuel, which makes getting around in cars difficult. Life near Melbourne is relatively normal, despite the global catastrophe. Most reports state that the radiation will reach the southernmost reaches of the globe in about six months – the only living people left on Earth are those living in South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and some parts of South America. Peter has been instructed to accompany Dwight on his final mission as a submarine commander, and he agrees to go, despite his concerns about leaving his wife, Mary, and infant daughter, Jennifer, to face the impending nuclear fall-out alone. Peter Holmes is a lieutenant commander in the Australian Navy, and Dwight Tower is the commander of a United States nuclear submarine stationed off the coast of Australia. Each of the characters deals with the reality of their coming death in a different way, and the novel follows each character until his or her death. The characters in the novel await their eventual death, as a cloud of radiation moves south toward Melbourne. On the Beach (1957) a dystopian novel by British novelist Nevil Shute, follows a group of people living in Melbourne, Australia about a year after a catastrophic nuclear war that has devastated the Northern Hemisphere, killing everyone north of the Equator.
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