Genre: Classics
Length: 368 pages
Audiobook Length: 10 hours and 18 minutes
First Published: 1950
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Publisher’s Description
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. But it turns out that they have a gift for her as well: the news that the young Australian soldier, Joe Harmon, who had risked his life to help the women, had miraculously survived. Jean’s search for Joe 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.
Quotes from A Town Like Alice
It’s no good going on living in the ashes of a dead happiness.
You don’t feel any different as you get older. Only, you can’t do so much.
Most jobs are interesting when you are learning them.
About Nevil Shute
Nevil Shute Norway was an aeronautical engineer and an author whose works include On the Beach and A Town Like Alice. Born in London, he settled in Australia where he died in 1960 at the age of 60.
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