First published in 1955, The Chrysalids is a terrific science fiction novel that is too often overlooked.
Part of the reason for that might be ongoing confusion about its title. Author John Wyndham was an Englishman who died in 1969. When The Chrysalids was published in the United States, it was given the far less interesting moniker Re-Birth. I suppose we should just be grateful Wyndham chose not to publish under his full name, which was a mouthful: John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris.
Whatever we call it, The Chrysalids is an amazing book. Wyndham never was as well-known as the "big three" of classic science fiction, but he deserved to be; this novel displays the precision of Isaac Asimov, the grace of Arthur C. Clarke, the drive of Robert A. Heinlein.
The book takes place in the distant future in what was once Labrador. This region of Canada has been spared the brunt of what Wyndham suggests was a nuclear war hundreds of years in the past. Yet there are mutations -- of crops, animals, and yes, people. The citizens of a town known as Waknuk regard these mutations as blasphemies; only through better faith in God, they believe, will these things ever stop.
David Storm is one of the mutants -- but his mutation is not physical. He, and his sister Petra and a cousin and a few other characters, are telepaths. Thus they manage to keep their difference hidden for a number of years.
But nothing lasts forever. Eventually, David and those like him must flee Waknuk -- and that journey out of darkness is as thrilling as anything I've ever read in science fiction.
Wyndham's view of the human condition could be fairly bleak, but The Chrysalids is a book of transcendence. I first read it as a teen-ager, a time when many of us seem to feel we are different or even outcast. I have revisited it half a dozen times since, often when life is offering me my share of challenges. It's that kind of book: One that sticks with you for decades.