Nevil Shute

Life
1899-1961 [b. Nevil Shute Norway]; wartime aircraft designer, later novelist and author of A Town Like Alice, &c.; son of Arthur Hamilton Norway and Mary Louisa Norway - his father being a former Postmaster General in Dublin at the time of the 1916 Rising when Nevil, aged 17, acted as a stretcher-bearer; worked as aeronautical engineer at Vickers and afterwards established his own airship company; served in WWI; Commander in the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve in World War II; worked on secret projects, later fictionalised as Most Secret (1945); emigrated to Australia, 1949; issued works incl. On the Beach (a post-A-bomb filmed successfully with Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner and Anthony Perkins) and A Town Like Alice (1950), a tale of love and war in Australia and Burma, his greatest romantic success.

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Works
Novels    
  • Ma oarazan (1926).
  • So Disdained (1928) [also as The Mysterious Aviator
  • Lonely Road (1932).
  • Ruined City (1938) [also as Kindling]
  • What Happened to the Corbetts? (1939) - [also as Ordeal]
  • Landfall (1940).
  • An Old Captivity (1940).
  • Pied Piper (1942).
  • Pastoral (1944).
  • Most Secret (1945).
  • Vinland the Good (1946).
  • The Chequer Board (1947).
  • No Highway (1948).
  • A Town Like Alice (1950) - aka The Legacy.
  • Round the Bend (1951).
  • The Far Country (1952).
  • Slide Rule: The Autobiography of an Engineer (1954).
  • Requiem for a Wren (1955) - aka The Breaking Wave.
  • Beyond the Black Stump (1956).
  • On the Beach (1957).
  • The Rainbow And the Rose (1958).
  • Trustee from the Toolroom (1960).
  • Stephen Morris (1961).
  • In the Wet (1969)
Source: Fantastic fiction (UK) website [link]

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Notes
Easter 1916: The memoirs of Shute père [Arthur Norway] and his mother [Mary Louisa Norway] are included in Keith Jeffrey, The GPO and the Easter Rising (IAP 2006), 208pp. [incl. The Sinn Fein Rebellion As They Saw It, IAP 1999].

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