Nevil Shute

After a nuclear World War III has destroyed most of the globe, the few remaining survivors in southern Australia await the radioactive cloud that is heading their way and bringing certain death to everyone in its path. Among them is an American submarine captain struggling to resist the knowledge that his wife and children in the United States must be dead. Then a faint Morse code signal is picked up, transmitting from somewhere near Seattle, and Captain Towers must lead his submarine crew on a bleak tour of the ruined world in a desperate search for signs of life. On the Beach is a remarkably convincing portrait of how ordinary people might face the most unimaginable nightmare.

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.

When his sister’s boat is wrecked in the Pacific, Keith Steward becomes the trustee for his little niece. In order to save her from destitution he has to embark on a voyage in a small yacht in inhospitable waters.

It is the summer of 1940 and in Europe the time of Blitzkrieg. John Howard, a 70-year-old Englishman vacationing in France, cuts shorts his tour and heads for home. He agrees to take two children with him.But war closes in. Trains fail, roads clog with refugees. And if things were not difficult enough, other children join in Howard's little band. At last they reach the coast and find not deliverance but desperation. The old Englishman's greatest test lies ahead of him.

Jennifer fled the drab monotony of post-war London for Australia, and feels like she has come home. When she meets Carl, she has every reason to stay. But the two come from different worlds, and need work to build a life together in a pioneer country.

The Breaking Wave is one of Nevil Shute’s most poignant and psychologically suspenseful novels, set in the years just after World War II.Sidelined by a wartime injury, fighter pilot Alan Duncan reluctantly returns to his parents’ remote sheep station in Australia to take the place of his brother Bill, who died a hero in the war. But his homecoming is marred by the suicide of his parents’ parlormaid, of whom they were very fond. Alan soon realizes that the dead young woman is not the person she pretended to be. Upon discovering that she had served in the Royal Navy and participated along with his brother in the secret build-up to the Normandy invasion, Alan sets out to piece together the tragic events and the lonely burden of guilt that unravelled one woman’s life. In the process of finding the answer to the mystery, he realizes how much he had in common with this woman he never knew and how “a war can go on killing people long after it’s all over.”

Theodore Honey is a scientist with an interest in the paranormal and a job testing metal fatigue in aircraft. When a new transatlantic plane, the Reindeer, is found to have crashed in Labrador, Theodore believes he knows why. The scientist is sent to the scene of the crash. En route to Canada Theodore learns he is flying in a Reindeer and is in danger.

From an Oxfordshire air base, Wellington bombers fly missions into Germany. Only a handful of crews have survived the war long enough to become experienced. Peter Marshall is captain of one crew. When he falls in love with Gervase, her rebuff nearly costs him his concentration and life. Their relationship blossoms when he has only five more missions to go. As they tick by, tension mounts.

Tom Cutter runs an air charter service from Arabia to the Far East after the war. His best friend is the Russian-American Connie Shanklin. Connie works for Tom and inspires faith and hope in men of all denominations.

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.

Originally published in 1953, IN THE WET is Nevil Shute's speculative glance into the future of the British Empire. An elderly clergyman stationed in the Australian bush is called to the bedside of a dying derelict. In his delirium Stevie tells a story of England in 1983 through the medium of a squadron air pilot in the service of Queen Elizabeth II.

A young airman, an Oxford don and his beautiful daughter are on an expedition to the Arctic. This time-travel story tells how they are transported by explorers of another the Norsemen and their long ships of a thousand years before.

Genevieve is a converted French fishing boat, manned by British officers and a small crew of free French ex-fishermen, armed only with a flame-thrower and few arms. They carry out their daring attack on the German boats off the Brittany coast. Every man involved in the raid is an unlikely hero in his own way.

Stanton Laird comes to the Australian outback to search for oil. There he meets and falls in love with Mollie. However cultural differences between Stanton and Mollie's world force the two lovers to make difficult decisions.

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.

Originally published in 1939 and unavailable for over 2 years, a novel written just before the war, which prophetically describes how it would affect a town like Southampton.

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 man—and reveals the shocking and tragic secrets that have influenced his life.

One rainy night Peter Moran is driving across the Sussex countryside. When he stops to give a lift to a bedraggled pedestrian he is amazed to discover an old wartime comrade from the Royal Flying Corps. Moran's loyalty is tested as he agrees to help his friend, even though he has acted treasonably.

A romantic World War II adventure about the strength of true love and how it can overcome any obstacle. A British air reconnaissance officer falls for a pub waitress, but finds his lift in chaos when he accidentally bombs a British submarine, mistaking it for a German U-boat. What begins as a romantic fling develops into true love as Mona fights to present the evidence she has discovered about this tragedy in the hope that it will absolve her lover.

Nevil Shute best describes this autobiography in his own words: "Most of my adult life, perhaps all the worthwhile part of it, has been spent messing about with airplanes. For 30 years there was a period when airplanes would fly when you wanted them to, but there were still fresh things to be learned on every flight, a period when airplanes were small and so easily built that experiments were cheap and new designs could fly within six months of the first glimmer in the mind of the designer."That halcyon period started about 1910 and it was in full flower after WW I when I was a young man; it died with WW II when airplanes had grown too costly and too complicated for individuals to build or even to operate. I count myself lucky that that fleeting period coincided with my youth and my young manhood, and that I had a part in it."

A rich middle-aged man finds his lonely life turned upside down when he falls in love with a pretty dance hostess and becomes involved in exposing a conspiracy to sabotage the British General Election. His dogged pursuit of the criminals will throw his life into grave danger.

A story of flying, drug smuggling and murder in the 1920s. Pilot Philip Stenning crashes his aircraft while flying from London to Devon. He is rescued by escaped prisoner Denis Compton, who claims he was sent to prison for embezzlement after being framed by his half-brother, Italian baron Rodrigo Mattani. Owing Compton his life, Stenning agrees to investigate Mattani's illegal activities.

INCLUDES THE NOVEL PILOTAGE Stephen Morris has just called off his engagement to the girl of his dreams because he is a penniless graduate with no prospects. He finds a job working as an aircraft mechanic, hoping to make his fortune. In Pilotage , Stephen's navigator Peter Dennison is struggling with the same problem. These two early novels draw on Nevil Shute's own experiences as a young engineer.

Book by Shute, Nevil

These two linked novels have flying as a shared theme. In Stephen Morris we see the eponymous hero leaving Oxford University unable to marry his girl because of a lack of prospects. He starts as a mechanic and a pilot at a friend’s aerodrome business. In Pilotage, Peter Dennison is to start as a junior partner at a firm in China. The woman he wishes to marry can’t accept his proposal if it means going to live in Hong Kong. Dennison has to find a way to make money and marry.

Nevil Shute (1899 – 1960) was a British novelist and aeronautical engineer. This collection contains 22 of his novels: Marazan So Disdained (aka The Mysterious Aviator) Lonely Road Ruined City (aka Kindling) What Happened to the Corbetts (aka Ordeal) An Old Captivity Landfall, A Channel Story Pied Piper Most Secret Pastoral The Chequer Board No Highway A Town Like Alice (aka The Legacy) Round the Bend The Far Country In the Wet Slide Rule: Autobiography of an Engineer Requiem for a Wren (aka The Breaking Wave) Beyond the Black Stump On the Beach The Rainbow and the Rose Trustee from the Toolroom

Omnibus contains;A Town Like Alice.Pied Piper.The Far Country.The Chequer BoardNo Highway

This book is a triple novel by Nevil Shute