Nevil Shute

From the hugely acclaimed author of On the Beach—a tale of love and war that follows its enterprising heroine from the Malayan jungle during World War II to the rugged Australian outback. • “Entertaining ... Dramatic ... Shute is a natural and effective story-teller.” —The New York Times

Jean Paget, a young Englishwoman living in Malaya, is captured by the invading Japanese...

She was from the hills of Yorkshire, country born and bred. He was a city boy. By the stream where they fished, they were two young people falling in love. Overhead, the bombers roared, threatening to blow their idyllic world, so young, so fresh, to smithereens.

Keith Stewart, a retiring and ingenious engineer, could not have been happier in his little house in the shabby London suburb of Ealing. There he invented the mini-motor, the six-volt generator, and the tiny Congreve clock. Then a chain of events sweeps him into deep waters and leads him to his happiest discovery yet.

When Stanton Laird, American geologist, goes prospecting for the Topeka Exploration Company in the savage Australian outback, he finds something a good deal more precious than oil.

Nurse Jean Paget is one of a small band of women trekking through the Japanese-occupied Malayan jungle, where they are befriended by Joe Harman, a tough Australian P.O.W. Later each learns tht the other has survived the horrors of the war, and they set out separately to find each other.