Shadow on the Hearth

Shadow on the Hearth (1950) is Judith Merril's first novel and one of the earliest works of nuclear war fiction to take the civilian domestic experience as its primary subject. When an atomic attack devastates New York City, Gladys Mitchell, a suburban housewife in Westchester, is left to manage her household and protect her children with no information, no communication with her husband in the city, and no clear sense of what the radiation threat means or how to respond to it. The novel unfolds almost entirely within the confines of her home and neighborhood, narrating the crisis through the rhythms of ordinary domestic life suddenly made terrifying.

Merril was a significant figure in postwar American science fiction, both as a writer and later as an anthologist whose annual Year's Best series helped shape the direction of the genre through the 1950s and 1960s. Shadow on the Hearth reflects the specific anxieties of the early atomic age and was ahead of its time in centering a woman's experience in a genre that rarely did so. It was later adapted for television as Atomic Attack (1954).

Hardcover. First Edition, First Printing. Octavo, bound in black cloth boards with silver lettering on spine. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1950. #11210.
Near fine in very good+ or better dust jacket minor shelf wear and slight fade along spine.