A TOWN LIKE ALICE

Hailed as Nevil Shute's greatest and most compelling novel, A Town Like
Alice tells a richly human story of courage, enterprise and love-in war and
in the aftermath of war.

It is the story of how Jean Paget, a young English girl, became the leader
and the mainstay of a party of British women and children, prisoners of the
Japanese, in a nightmare trek through Malaya. Stricken by illness and utter
exhaustion many of them died-those who survived owed their lives to Jean's
fortitude and strength of character. It tells too how she came to meet
again the young Australian who had helped them - whose ghastly torture they
had been forced to watch. How she starts a new life in the wilds of
Northern Queensland becoming the driving force behind the transformation of
a near derelict collection of houses into a thriving town like Alice
Springs.