A classic adventure from the author of
A Town Like Alice and
On the Beach.
It is the rainy season. Drunk and delirious, an old man lies dying in the Queensland bush. In his opium-hazed last hours, a priest finds his deserted shack and listens to his last words. Half-awake and half-dreaming the old man tells the story of an adventure set decades in the future, in a very different world…
Author ProfileNevil 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).
ReviewsShute is an honest exciting adventure writer who blends narrative gift with a fine power of description,Exhibits his talents at their provocative best,That shattering, unaffected, literary style of his is wholly deceptive…is, in fact, masterly
