Jean Paget, a young English woman, is captured by the Japanese army in Malaya during World War Two. She is forced on a brutal march across the country with a group of women and children. During this appalling ordeal she befriends Joe Harman, an Australian soldier who risks his own life to help the women.

A few years later, and back in England, Jean receives an unexpected and substantial inheritance. She decides to use the money to repay the Malayan people who risked their lives to help her and her fellow prisoners during the war so she travels back to the village where they stayed. From there she travels on to Australia in search of lost love. Cut off in the Australian outback and thousands of miles from home, Jean once again draws on her admirable determination and entrepreneurial spirit when she sets out to build a thriving community.

A heart-rending story of strength in adversity, A Town Like Alice is a celebration of the overwhelming power of love.

Designed to appeal to the booklover, the Macmillan Collector's Library is a series of beautiful gift editions of much loved classic titles. Macmillan Collector's Library are books to love and treasure.

About the Author

Nevil Shute Norway was born in London in 1899. He graduated from Balliol College, Oxford with a degree in engineering in 1922 and began working as an aeronautical engineer. The first of his 24 novels, Marazan, was published in 1926 and these two very separate careers flourished in tandem until he ceased work in 1938 to write full-time. As a Naval Volunteer Reservist in the Second World War, Shute developed anti-submarine missiles and was sent to Normandy to chronicle the D-Day landings. In 1945 he emigrated to Australia with his wife and daughters and there wrote perhaps his most famous novels - A Town Like Alice (1950) and On the Beach (1957). He died in Melbourne in 1960.