10 Best Nevil Shute Books

After a nuclear war wipes out the Northern Hemisphere, the last American submarine and the people of Melbourne wait for the creeping cloud of radiation to reach them. Shute follows their routines, small romances, and hard choices as they face certain extinction.

As a young woman, Jean Paget survives a brutal wartime march in occupied Malaya and forms a bond with an Australian prisoner. Years later an unexpected inheritance sends her to the Queensland outback, where she searches for him and pours her money into turning a dusty settlement into a real town.

Shy aviation scientist Theodore Honey is convinced a new airliner, the Reindeer, will suffer catastrophic metal fatigue far earlier than anyone expects. When he ends up flying on a suspect aircraft, his desperate actions pit one obscure engineer against bureaucracy, politics and the cost of being right too late.

Seventy year old John Howard goes to France for a quiet fishing holiday and instead finds himself shepherding a growing group of endangered children across a collapsing, Nazi occupied landscape. Each new rescue slows their journey home and stretches one elderly man’s courage to its limit.

Quiet model engineering writer Keith Stewart becomes guardian to his young niece after her parents die in a yacht wreck, and realises her inheritance lies hidden in the Pacific. With little money but worldwide goodwill among fellow engineers, he undertakes an unlikely journey to recover what is owed to her.

After her grandmother’s death exposes postwar Britain’s hardships, Jennifer Morton visits relatives on an Australian sheep station and falls for Carl Zlinter, a Czech refugee working in the bush. When a logging accident forces him to operate illegally, both must weigh compassion against the strict letter of the law.

An Australian veteran returns home after studying in England and encounters a mystery linked to a woman's death. Looking into her past draws him toward wartime relationships and the lasting consequences of experiences shared across England and Australia.

Aviation entrepreneur Tom Cutter builds a freight business across the Middle East and Asia with the help of Connie Shaklin, a gifted mechanic of mixed heritage whose teachings about honest work slowly become a new religion. Their partnership tests loyalty, prejudice and the power of belief in everyday labour.

Told he has only a year to live, John Turner sets out to find three men he once shared a wartime hospital ward with. Tracking them across England, Burma and the United States, he discovers stories of race, loyalty and forgiveness that change his view of his own life.

This memoir follows Shute from schoolboy and wartime soldier to airship engineer and co founder of Airspeed. He describes the design and flight of the R100, the grind of hand calculations, and the precarious early years of running a small aircraft company between the wars.