A Town Like Alice

With no camp willing to take them, the women and children were marched from village to village for months, and many did not survive. Jean, who spoke Malay and kept her head, became their leader. During the march they met Joe Harman, an Australian prisoner of war who risked his life to help them with food and was cruelly punished for it. After the war, Jean uses her inheritance to repay the kindness of a village that took the women in.

Then, learning that Joe survived, she travels to the Australian outback to find him, and settles in Willstown, a dusty, dying settlement. With determination and business sense, she starts small enterprises to make it a place where young people would want to stay, a town like Alice Springs. The wartime chapters are harrowing but told with restraint, and the second half is warm and hopeful. Some attitudes and language of the period now feel dated. The novel was inspired by a real wartime story.

Moving, inspiring and deeply humane, one of Nevil Shute's best-loved novels. It is a story about what ordinary people can achieve through courage and persistence, and its quiet optimism has kept it popular for decades. About 368 pages in the Vintage Classics paperback, with an introduction by Eric Lomax.