Nevil Shute · 1950 · global

Nevil Shute's 1950 novel. Captured by the Japanese in Malaya, Jean Paget endures a forced march of months with a group of women and children, no camp willing to take them, and there meets an Australian prisoner, Joe Harman, who is brutally punished for helping them. Each believes the other dead. After the war Jean inherits a fortune, returns to thank the Malay village that sheltered them, learns Joe survived, and follows him to the Queensland outback, where she sets about building a dying cattle town into something alive, a town like Alice Springs.

1. 1
   Kuala Lumpur

   Caught in the fall of Malaya in 1942, Jean Paget and the other women are taken prisoner and begin a long forced march with nowhere to be imprisoned and no one to receive them.

2. 2
   Kuala Telang

   At a Malay village by the sea the exhausted women are at last allowed to stop and work the rice paddies, surviving the war where so many did not.

3. 3
   London

   Years later, having inherited money in England, Jean determines to repay the village and learns that the Australian who saved them, thought hanged, is alive.

4. 4
   Willstown

   She follows Joe Harman to Willstown in the Gulf Country of Queensland, and resolves to build the remote cattle town into a place where people might choose to stay, a town like Alice.