When Stanton Laird, American geologist, goes prospecting for the Topeka Exploration Company in the savage Australian outback, he finds something a good deal more precious than oil.
Eight hundred women and children begin a 1,200-mile journey on foot across Japanese-occupied Malaya. At journey's end only 30 will still be alive. This is the story of one woman, of her ordeal, and of how she was saved by the sacrifice of an Australian soldier. It is a story of rare individual courage in the face of certain death, and hope in the face of despair.
A war no one fully understands has devastated the planet with radioactive fallout from massive cobalt bombing. Melbourne, Australia is the only area whose citizens have not yet succumbed to the contamination. But there isn't much time left, a few months, maybe more-and the citizens of Melbourne must decide how they will live the remaining weeks of their lives, and how they will face a hopeless future. Published in 1957, On the Beach is considered a classic nuclear holocaust novel, and a masterpiece of speculative fiction.
Life in the Corbett family turned upside down when the first German bombs struck their well-ordered street. But life goes on through fire and destruction, life and love rising from the rubble of London and "the Blitz."
Keith Stewart, a retiring and ingenious engineer, could not have been happier in his little house in the shabby London suburb of Ealing. There he invented the mini-motor, the six-volt generator, and the tiny Congreve clock. Then a chain of events sweeps him into deep waters and leads him to his happiest discovery yet.
Allan had been away from Coombaragana, flying in the Royal Air Force. Now he has returned, wounded and disillusioned, to his ancestral home. Days before, Jessie Proctor had taken her own life. Why? Allan looked at the young face in the photograph in Jessie's passport and froze. He knew who she really was.
An old man lies dying during the rainy season in the Queensland outback. And in the night, slipping in and out of an opium sleep that drifts him towards death, he draws his listener into a tale that opens onto incredible horizons.
