If what you’re looking for is a plain old-fashioned good story, well told and with no highfalutin language, you simply can’t do better than to hunt up Nevil Shute’s novels and immerse yourself in them. James Hilton, author of Goodbye, Mr. Chips and no mean storyteller himself, referred to Shute’s No Highway as “first-rate yarning.” The same could be said for all his novels.

Nevil Shute Norway lived from 1899 to 1960, and although he was English born and bred, he moved permanently to Australia, where he set some of the novels that I most enjoy rereading. An infantryman in the British army in World War I and a reservist in World War II, his nonliterary career was in the aerospace industry. (He was problably the first to explore in a novel the then-revolutionary notion that planes suffer from metal fatigue, a phenomenon that is the centerpiece of No Highway’s plot). Both his wartime and peacetime experiences show up time and again in his writings. He wrote more than two dozen works of fiction (the first, Marazan, was published in 1926, and the last, Trustee from the Toolroom, was published posthumously in 1960), but he thought of himself primarily as an engineer. In fact, his autobiography, Slide Rule, is subtitled The Autobiography of an Engineer. Although he’s probably best known for On the Beach, about the last survivors of a global atomic war, my particular favorites—to which I return time and again—include Requiem for a Wren and, above all, A Town Like Alice.

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But here’s something about Nevil Shute that I must tell you: His novels, like those of Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, and countless other writers published in the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s, include racist language that, while in common usage then, rings uncomfortably in our ears today. So, for instance, despite the fact that Shute’s novel The Chequer Board is sympathetic to the plight of black soldiers in World War II, and is even supportive of interracial marriages (the African American character marries a British girl from Cornwall, while the British flyer marries a Burmese woman), the racist language makes for some discomfiting reading.

In addition to the books mentioned above, Shute’s books include the following:

Beyond the Black Stump

The Far Country

In the Wet

Landfall: A Channel Story

Lonely Road

Most Secret

An Old Captivity

Pastoral

Pied Piper

The Rainbow and the Rose

Round the Bend

Ruined City (the American title is Kindling)

So Disdained

Stephen Morris

Vinland the Good

What Happened to the Corbetts (the American title is Ordeal)

[Excerpted from More Book Lust]