Brother in The Land Quotes

Danny survives the bombing and rejoins what is left of his family to face the struggles of life after the bombing. The book is full of awful scenes---the dead who died from the bombing, the dead who slowly die after the bombing, shooting those who have food, and much more.

They’ve still got food stocks in the cellar, enough to last them for a very long time. But the problem is they need to be careful about sharing or appearing to not need food, which only advertises that they have it.

The dark world of a nuclear fallout — a world blighted by dead crops, a poisoned atmosphere, the devastating, long-lasting horrors inflicted by post-mushroom-cloud radiation

It’s also horribly, heartbreakingly sad. After a nuclear cataclysm transforms the world as they know it, the survivors are thrown into a cruel new reality.

“Anyway, I played with him a bit in he back where Dad stacked the crates. It was all right at first but then he started wittering; so when Dad went off in the van, i gave him ten pence for a lolly. He ran inside and I got on the bike and left. ”

Before the nuclear bomb that destroyed their northern England town (and many others), Danny Lodge, his little brother Ben and his father kept a little convenience shop.

“It was dark when I heard it. I’d been asleep: God knows how. I guess it was my mind’s way of denying reality. Anyway, I woke up suddenly and there was this awful noise; a sort of moaning, and a shuffling sound outside the bunker. I lay rigid, biting my lip, something was moving about out there, something big.”

Denny, a teenager, is one of the unlucky ones, a survivor, one of those who have come through a nuclear war alive.

“It was that which first made me understand the enormity of what had happened. Nuclear missiles had fallen on England, and if they’d fallen on England they must have fallen on a lot of other countries too. This rain, black rain, was falling now on each of them.”

“It was dark when I heard it. I’d been asleep. God knows how. I guess it was my mind’s way of denying reality. Anyway, I woke up suddenly and there was this awful noise; a sort of moaning, and a shuffling sound outside the bunker.”