TheFar Country

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).A young English woman leaves her ageing parents to visit friends living in the Australian outback. She falls in love, both with the country and with Carl, a doctor and Czech refugee. Brought together through dramatic encounters and strange twists of fate, their relationship hangs in the balance when Jennifer is called back to England.Enjoyable story of love blossoming over the scalpelsA heartlifting novel by a master-weaver of romance and adventureNevil Shute made me yearn for a faithful, plodding, Shute-type of man. I imagined us trekking across the Australian outback, finding a run-down hamlet, and then transforming it together until death or flood parted us