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Find out moreNevil Shute Norway was born on 17 January 1899 in Ealing, London. After attending the Dragon School and Shrewsbury School, he studied Engineering Science at Balliol College, Oxford. He worked as an aeronautical engineer and published his first novel, Marazan, in 1926. In 1931 he married Frances Mary Heaton and they went on to have two daughters. During the Second World War he joined the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve where he worked on developing secret weapons. After the war he continued to write and settled in Australia where he lived until his death on 12 January 1960. His most celebrated novels include Pied Piper (1942), No Highway (1948), A Town Like Alice (1950) and On the Beach (1957).
August 2014 Guest Editor Gerald Seymour on Most Secret... The stories of Nevil Shute have a timeless appeal. He was a complete story teller, knew how to put together a beginning, a middle, and an end. The reader is transported by the personalities he introduces us to, and we live with them and care about them. The one most often in my mind is ‘Most Secret’ which tells of a small group of fighting men who convert a trawler into a mini-warship and sail across the Channel to take on naval forces of the German occupation. I usually end up with an unashamed wet eye when I return to the last few pages of this epic. He’s brilliant.
Designed to appeal to the booklover, the Macmillan Collector's Library is a series of beautiful gift editions of much loved classic titles. Macmillan Collector's Library are books to love and treasure. A heart-rending story of strength in adversity, A Town Like Alice by Nevil Shute is a celebration of the overwhelming power of love. This Macmillan Collector's Library edition features an afterword by bestselling novelist, Jenny Colgan. Jean Paget, a young English woman, is captured by the Japanese army in Malaya during World War Two. She is forced on a brutal march across the country with a group of women and children. During this appalling ordeal she befriends Joe Harman, an Australian soldier who risks his own life to help the women. A few years later, and back in England, Jean receives an unexpected and substantial inheritance. She decides to use the money to repay the Malayan people who risked their lives to help her and her fellow prisoners during the war so she travels back to the village where they stayed. From there she travels on to Australia in search of lost love. Cut off in the Australian outback and thousands of miles from home, Jean once again draws on her admirable determination and entrepreneurial spirit when she sets out to build a thriving community.
When Tom Cutter hires Constantine Shaklin as an engineer in his international air freight business, he little realizes the extraordinary gifts of his new recruit. Shaklin soon proves to possess a charismatic power that inspires everyone he meets to a new faith and hope for humanity. As Cutter's business expands across the Middle East and Asia, so does Shaklin's fame, unifying people from a wide array of cultures and religions with his unusual blend of the practical and the spiritual.
When seasoned pilot Johnny Pascoe tries to rescue a sick girl from the Tasmanian outback, his plane crashes and leaves him stranded and dangerously injured. Ronnie Clarke, who was trained by Pascoe, attempts to fly a doctor in to help, but rough weather makes his mission more difficult than he imagined. As he waits overnight at Pascoe's house for a chance to try again the next day, Clarke revisits the past of this unusual manand reveals the shocking and tragic secrets that have influenced his life.
After pilot Philip Stenning is involved in a near-fatal plane crash, he feels he owes a debt of gratitude to the man who rescued him. However, his mysterious savior turns out to be an escaped convict and Stenning's determination to help this man leads him into a tense and dramatic adventure of intrigue, drug-running, and murder.
It is the wet season in the Australian outback. Drunk and delirious, an old ex-pilotknown as ';Pisspot Stevie' lies dying in a remote cabin in the Queensland bush. When a priest named Roger Hargreaves comes upon him, Stevie is smoking opium to relieve the pain of his last moments. The priest listens as Stevie, in an opium-fueled haze, begins to describe a very different life he once livednot in the past, but decades in the future, as a mixed-race aviator who finds love and glory in service to the Queen. After Stevie's death, as Hargreaves tries to sort dream from reality, he makes discoveries that cause him to wonder if he has been granted a glimpse beyond the veil.
When Henry Warren, director of an English bank, lands by chance in a hospital in a bleak Northern town that has been ruined by the closure of its shipyard, he discovers nothing less than a new purpose for his life. Moved by the fate of the town's inhabitants, Warren risks his fortune and reputation to save the shipyard and restore the town to its former prosperity. In seeking to change the fate of the town, he radically changes his own.
Nevil Shute was a pioneer in the world of flying long before he began to write the stories that made him a bestselling novelist. This autobiography charts Shute's path from childhood to his career as a gifted aeronautical engineer working at the forefront of the technological experimentation of the 1920s and 30s. The inspiration for many of the themes and concerns of Shutes novels can be found in this enjoyable and enlightening memoir.
Theodore Honey is a shy, inconspicuous engineer whose eccentric interests are frowned upon in aviation circles. When a passenger plane crashes in Newfoundland under unexplained circumstances, Honey is determined to prove his unorthodox theory about what went wrong to his superiors, before more lives are lost. But while flying to the crash scene to investigate, Honey discovers to his horror that he is on board one of the defective planes and that he and his fellow passengers, including a friendly young stewardess and an aging movie actress, are in imminent peril.
The expression ';beyond the black stump' refers to the deepest, darkest wilds of the Australian outback, the setting for Nevil Shute's novel of a romance tested by cultural difference. Stanton Laird is an American geologist sent to hunt oil in a remote part of Western Australia. There he befriends the highly unconventional Regan family, the rough-and-tumble owners of a million-acre sheep station, and falls in love with their daughter Mollie. However, when Mollie goes to join him in America, the young couple must face the realization that they are products of radically different worlds.
Keith Stewart is a quiet and unassuming man called upon to undertake an extraordinary task. A skilled maker of miniature working models, he lives a modest life devoted to his hobby. But when his sister and her wealthy husband die in a shipwreck on a coral reef in the Pacificwhile trying to smuggle out of England their entire fortune in diamonds hidden in the keel of their yachtKeith becomes trustee for his orphaned niece. To save her from destitution he must travel halfway around the world and risk a long voyage in a small boat in inhospitable waters to recover her inheritance. In the course of his adventure-filled quest, a colorful and international cast of characters mobilize to help him, and this humble man discovers he has more friends and admirers than he could have dared to imagine.
These two related novellas, Stephen Morris and Pilotage, were Nevil Shute's first works of fiction and drew on his own youthful experiences. Both concern young men obsessed with the early world of aviation. Stephen Morris has just called off his engagement to the girl he loves because he is a penniless graduate with no prospectsbut for his dream of building airplanes. Pilotage continues the story, focusing on Stephen's ambitious navigator Peter Dennison, as he tests a daring idea for a new cross-Atlantic airmail service.
When a young Englishwoman named Jennifer Morton leaves London to visit relatives on their sheep ranch in the Australian outback, she falls in love both with the gloriously beautiful country and with Carl, a Czech refugee who was a doctor in his own land and now works as a lumberjack. They are brought together through dramatic encounters and strange twists of fate, but their relationship hangs in the balance when Jennifer is called back to England.
Nevil Shute wrote this prophetic novel just before the start of the Second World War. In it he imagines the devastation that results from an aerial bomb attack on Southampton that destroys the city's infrastructure and leaves the inhabitants at the mercy of cholera and further assaults. Against this dramatic backdrop, Shute grippingly chronicles the trials and tribulations of the Corbett family as they struggle to get to safety.
John Turner, a young man with a checkered past, has been told he has just one year to live. He decides to use his remaining time in search of three very different men he met in the hospital during the war, each of them in trouble of some kind: a pilot whose wife had betrayed him, a young corporal charged with killing a civilian in a brawl, and a black G.I. wrongly accused of the attempted rape of a white English girl. As Turner discovers where these men have landed on the checkerboard of life, he learns about compassion, tolerance, and second chances, and overcomes his fear of death.
When Peter Moran, a former World War I pilot, picks up a man on the roadside while driving through a bitter rainy night, he is startled to discover that the bedraggled man is a wartime comrade of his who has just survived a crash landing. As he learns more about his old friend's strange mission, Moran finds himself entangled in treasonous international plots, flying adventures, and tests of both his bravery and his loyalty.
When Jerry Chambers, a young coastal patrol pilot during World War II, is accused of mistakenly sinking a British submarine he is reprimanded and sent to a remote posting to test an experimental new bomb, a dangerous mission far away from the woman he loves. While Jerry risks his life, his sweetheart Mona sets about trying to clear her lover's name before it is too late.
Contemporary / British English Nuclear war has destroyed all life in thenorthern countries of the world. Now the deadly radiation is travelling south. In Australia, where people are still alive, Peter and Mary Holmes are trying to live their lives as normally as possible as the radiation comes closer and closer. What can they do? Is this the end of life on earth?
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