A town like Alice
Nevil Shute's most beloved novel, a tale of love and war, follows its enterprising heroine from the Malayan jungle during World War II to the rugged Australian outback. Jean Paget, a young Englishwoman living in Malaya, is captured by the invading Japanese and forced on a brutal seven-month death march with dozens of other women and children. A few years after the war, Jean is back in England, the nightmare behind her. However, an unexpected inheritance inspires her to return to Malaya to give something back to the villagers who saved her life. Jean's travels leads her to a desolate Australian outpost called Willstown, where she finds a challenge that will draw on all the resourcefulness and spirit that carried her through her war-time ordeals.
Stats for nerds
4recommend
8mentions
8people
2010–2026years
50% recommend50% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- You might enjoy the novel A Town Like Alice by Nevil Shute.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nevil_Shute
A Town Like Alice is probably the most popular in Australia, where he resided after the war. Also made into a good movie.
- Our local bookstore regularly publishes top 100 lists in various categories which often have good selections. Goodreads is pretty good for that as well, and Amazon as mattm suggested.
Asking people for suggestions is a good idea too - obviously that's what you're doing here... I recently read 'A Town like Alice' by Nevil Shute which I really enjoyed. Maybe you could check that out?
Good luck!
- 96. A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
- Nevil Shute was an engineer and he wrote some well respected novels like the nuclear war story On the Beach (made into a movie twice), A Town like Alice (made into a film and TV series), and No Highway (sometimes called No Highway in the Sky after the title of the film based on it), which actually deals with aircraft engineering and the problems involved in designing early jet airliners.
- This is further afield, but it reminded me of the novel A Town Like Alice by Nevil Shute. The protagonist is an Englishwoman who inherits a legacy and uses it to open businesses that employ the women of an Australian outpost.
