Landfall

Vintage are relaunching this fantastic author by publishing On the Beach, A Town Like Alice, Pied Piper and Requiem for a Wren together and simultaneously making Nevil Shute's entire backlist available in POD.Nevil Shute draws comparison with a range of writers ranging from Graham Greene to Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling and H.E. Bates.Nevil Shute 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).Jerry Chambers, a fresh-faced young pilot, mistakenly sinks a British submarine. He is reprimanded and sent to a remote posting to test an experimental new bomb, a dangerous mission far away from the girl he loves. While Jerry risks his life, his sweetheart Mona sets about clearing her lover's name...but will she be too late?A story that grips the reader with its quiet veracity, its truth to character, its understanding of the young man of the R.A.F and the nature of their job, of the so much owing so many to so few. The story has pace and excitement, unforced sentiment and wholly unaffected gaiety...Alive, humourous and finely restrained in feeling throughout...fascinating descriptions of Service operations...thrilling and eloquentA admirably good story, full of drama and good humourA good simple story...genuinely movingDirect, simple, wholly free from highfalutin nonsense and entirely charmingExciting reading of war on land and in the air