
A town like Alice
by Nevil Shute · first published 1950
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8HN commenters
2010–2026first – last mentioned
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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 Austral
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…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!
on “Ask HN: Got a Kindle. What now? What books should I read?” ↗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.
on “Panjandrum: The ‘giant firework’ built to break Hitler's Atlantic Wall” ↗96. A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
You might enjoy the novel A Town Like Alice by Nevil Shute.
on “Austin’s surge of new housing construction drove down rents” ↗…and the crash, in his career development and thinking. He was one of the engineers in the r100 design (not the one which crashed in the alps, that was the r101) Nevil Shute (no highway, on the beach, a town like alice) in 'slide rule' talks about his experience doing complex mesh stress/strain calculations for r100s framing which was a mixture of duralumin compression struts and wires in tension. All done with a slide…
on “Welcome Aboard the R-100” ↗Also see "Slide Rule: Autobiography of an Engineer" by Nevil Shute, who was the senior stress engineer of the British R100.. (beside being a famous author, eg "On the Beach", "A Town like Alice", etc)
on “Caltech professor helps solve Hindenburg disaster” ↗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.
on “Lore Harp McGovern built a microcomputer empire from her suburban home” ↗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…
on “The DIY Multideck” ↗