Red cloth binding with black title. Blue cloth binding with gilt title.

• We provide an in-depth photographic presentation of this item to stimulate your feeling and touch. More traditional book descriptions are immediately available.

• No Highway: Requiem for a Wren

• Note: This book carries the £5.00 discount to those that subscribe to the F.B.A. mailing list.

Two very readable fine novels by Nevil Shute

Nevil Shute Norway (17 January 1899 – 12 January 1960) was an English novelist and aeronautical engineer who spent his later years in Australia. He used his full name in his engineering career and Nevil Shute as his pen name, in order to protect his engineering career from inferences by his employers (Vickers) or from fellow engineers that he was “not a serious person” or from potentially adverse publicity in connection with his novels, which included On the Beach and A Town Like Alice.

Shute’s first novel, Stephen Morris, was written in 1923, but not published until 1961 (with its 1924 sequel, Pilotage).

His first published novel was Marazan, which came out in 1926. After that he averaged one novel every two years until the 1950s, with the exception of a six-year hiatus while he was establishing his own aircraft construction company, Airspeed Ltd. Sales of his books grew slowly with each novel, but he became much better known after the publication of his third to last book, On the Beach, in 1957.

Shute’s novels are written in a simple, highly readable style, with clearly delineated plot lines. Where there is a romantic element, sex is referred to only obliquely. Many of the stories are introduced by a narrator who is not a character in the story. The most common theme in Shute’s novels is the dignity of work, spanning all classes, whether a Spanish bar hostess in the Balkans (Ruined City) or a brilliant but unworldly boffin (No Highway). His novels are in three main clusters: early pre-war flying adventures; Second World War tales; and stories set in Australia.

Another recurrent theme is the bridging of social barriers such as class (Lonely Road and Landfall), race (The Chequer Board), or religion (Round the Bend). The Australian novels are individual hymns to that country, with subtle disparagement of the mores of the United States (Beyond the Black Stump) and overt antipathy towards the post-World War II socialist government of Shute’s native Britain (The Far Country and In the Wet).

Shute’s heroes tended to be like himself: middle-class solicitors, doctors, accountants, bank managers, and engineers—generally university graduates. However (as in Trustee from the Toolroom), Shute valued the honest artisans and their social integrity and contributions to society more than the contributions of the upper classes.

Aviation and engineering provide the backdrop for many of Shute’s novels. He identified how engineering, science, and design could improve human life and more than once used the anonymous epigram, “It has been said an engineer is a man who can do for ten shillings what any fool can do for a pound.”

Several of Shute’s novels explored the boundary between accepted science and rational belief, on the one hand, and mystical or paranormal possibilities, including reincarnation, on the other hand. Shute did this by including elements of fantasy and science fiction in novels that were considered mainstream. They included Buddhist astrology and folk prophecy in The Chequer Board; the effective use of a planchette in No Highway; a messiah figure in Round the Bend; reincarnation, science fiction, and Aboriginal psychic powers in In the Wet.

Twenty-four of his novels and novellas have been published. Many of his books have been adapted for the screen, including Lonely Road in 1936; Landfall: A Channel Story in 1949; Pied Piper in 1942 and again in 1959, and also as Crossing to Freedom, a CBS made-for-television movie, in 1990; On the Beach in 1959 and again in 2000 as a two-part miniseries; and No Highway in 1951. A Town Like Alice was adapted into a film in 1956, serialized for Australian television in 1981, and also broadcast on BBC Radio 2 in 1997 starring Jason Connery, Becky Hindley, Bernard Hepton and Virginia McKenna. Shute’s 1952 novel The Far Country was filmed for television as six one-hour episodes in 1972, and as a two-part miniseries in 1987.

Vintage Books reprinted all 23 of his books in 2009.

Shute’s final work was published more than 40 years after his death. The Seafarers was first drafted in 1946–47, rewritten, and then put aside. In 1948, Shute again rewrote it, changing the title to Blind Understanding, but he left the manuscript incomplete. According to Dan Telfair in the foreword of the 2002 edition, some of the themes in The Seafarers and Blind Understanding were used in Shute’s 1955 novel Requiem for a Wren.