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Nevil Shute (1899–1960)

Autor(a) de On the Beach

53+ Works 18,365 Membros 645 Críticas 73 Favorited

About the Author

Nevil Shute Norway was born in Ealing, London, England, on January, 17 1899. At the age of 11, Norway played truant from his first preparatory school in Hammersmith. After he was discovered, he was sent to the Dragon School, Oxford, and from there to Shrewsbury. He was on holiday in Dublin at the mostrar mais time of the Easter rising of 1916 and acted as an ambulance driver, winning a commendation for gallant conduct. He then entered the Royal Military Academy, intending to be commissioned into the Royal Flying Corps, but a bad stammer led to his being failed at his final medical examination and returned to civil life. The last few months of the war were spent on home service as a private in the Suffolk Regiment. In 1919, Norway went to Balliol College, Oxford, where he took a third class honors course in engineering science in 1922. During the vacations he worked, unpaid, as an aeronautical engineer, for the Aircraft Manufacturing Company at Hendon, and then for Geoffrey de Havilland's own firm, which he joined as an employee upon finishing at Oxford. He learned to fly and gained experience as a test observer. During the evenings he diligently wrote novels and short stories unperturbed by rejection slips from publishers. In 1924 Norway took the post of Chief Calculator to the Airship Guarantee Company, to work on the construction of the R100. In 1929 he became Deputy Chief Engineer under Barnes Wallis, and in the following year he flew to and from Canada in the R100. After the end of the airship project, jobs were hard to come by due to the depression so Shute started an aircraft manufacturing company, Airspeed Limited. This company was ultimately successful and built a large number of aircraft during the war. Shute remained joint managing director until 1938. When the business became too routine, he decided to get out of the rut and live by writing. The de Havillands, the first aviation job Shute had ever had, wound up buying Airspeed Ltd. He had by then enjoyed some success as a novelist and had sold the film rights of Lonely Road and Ruined City. At the outbreak of war in 1939, Norway joined the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve as a Sub-Lieutenant in the Miscellaneous Weapons Department. Rising to Lieutenant Commander, he found experimenting with secret weapons a job after his own heart. But he found that his growing celebrity as a writer caused him to be in the Normandy landings on 6th June 1944, for the Ministry of Information, and to be sent to Burma as a correspondent in 1945. He entered Rangoon with the 15th Corps from Arakan. Soon after demobilisation in 1945 he emigrated to Australia and made his home in Langwarrin, Victoria. His output of novels, which began with Marazan (1926) continued to the end. Shute was one of the leading aeronautical engineers in Britain during the 30's and a fellow of the Royal Aeronautical Society. When he began writing in the 20's, he feared that a reputation as a writer of fiction might harm his engineering career. For this reason he published under his two Christian names, Nevil Shute and engineered under his "real" name, Nevil S. Norway. Nevil Shute Norway died in Melbourne on January, 12 1960. (Bowker Author Biography) mostrar menos
Image credit: Courtesy of the NYPL Digital Gallery (image use requires permission from the New York Public Library)

Obras por Nevil Shute

On the Beach (1957) 4,862 exemplares
A Town Like Alice (1950) 3,721 exemplares
Trustee from the Toolroom (1960) 892 exemplares
Pied Piper (1942) 880 exemplares
No Highway (1948) 590 exemplares
Pastoral (1944) 583 exemplares
The Far Country (1952) 577 exemplares
The Chequer Board (1947) 547 exemplares
Requiem for a Wren (1955) 542 exemplares
Round the Bend (1951) 496 exemplares
In the Wet (1953) 446 exemplares
An Old Captivity (1940) 444 exemplares
Most Secret (1945) 428 exemplares
The Rainbow and the Rose (1958) 390 exemplares
Slide Rule (1954) 358 exemplares
Landfall (1940) 334 exemplares
Beyond the Black Stump (1956) 325 exemplares
What Happened to the Corbetts (1939) 313 exemplares
Ruined City (1938) 298 exemplares
So Disdained (1928) 277 exemplares
Marazan (1926) 268 exemplares
Lonely Road (1932) 253 exemplares
Stephen Morris (1961) 191 exemplares
On the Beach (abridged) (1972) 70 exemplares
A Town Like Alice (New Windmills) (1958) 44 exemplares
Vinland the Good (1946) 37 exemplares
The Seafarers (2002) 14 exemplares
Ruined City / Landfall (1968) 10 exemplares
A Town Like Alice 4 exemplares
See List 2 exemplares
Formynderen 2 (1988) 1 exemplar
Formynderen 1 1 exemplar
A Town Like Alice [abridged] (1992) — Autor — 1 exemplar
Most Secret AND The Legacy (1966) 1 exemplar
Förmyndaren 1 exemplar

Associated Works

Secret Weapons of World War II (1956) — Prefácio, algumas edições80 exemplares
The Valancourt Book of Horror Stories: Volume Two (2017) — Contribuidor — 76 exemplares
Once is enough (1959) — Prefácio, algumas edições67 exemplares
On the Beach [1959 film] (1959) — Original book — 45 exemplares
A Town like Alice [1981 TV mini series] (1958) — Original novel — 42 exemplares
Reader's Digest Condensed Books 1976 v01 (1976) — Contribuidor — 31 exemplares
Great World War II Stories: 50th Anniversary Collection (1989) — Contribuidor — 29 exemplares
A Town Like Alice [1956 film] (1956) — Original book — 24 exemplares
Reader's Digest Condensed Books 1960 v03 (1960) — Autor — 20 exemplares
Reader's Digest Condensed Books 1959 v01 (1959) — Contribuidor — 15 exemplares
On the Beach [2000 film] — Original book — 9 exemplares
The Far Country [1987 miniseries] (1987) — Original book — 4 exemplares
Pied Piper [1942 film] — Original book — 2 exemplares

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Membros

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January 2022: Nevil Shute em Monthly Author Reads (Junho 2022)

Críticas

It's rare for me to give a book five stars, but this book is an absolute gem. The prose is lovely without being overdone, the plot is engrossing, and the characters were finely drawn. I can't wait to read every book Nevil Shute ever wrote, and will consider it an honor to do so.
 
Assinalado
silva_44 | 138 outras críticas | Mar 6, 2024 |
What a beautifully written novel inspired in part by a real event during the Japanese occupation of Sumatra during World War II (which I learned in the Author’s Note at the end)! The story itself was compelling — I barely took a break all of New Year’s Day as I devoured it. The central characters were well drawn. Given this novel was published in 1950, I was surprised and pleased that the female protagonist, Jean Paget, was portrayed as a strong, competent, savvy, visionary woman, who endured and rose above the deplorable conditions of her captivity during WWII in Malaysia and whose later unexpected inherited wealth comes full circle from Australia to Scotland and England back to Australia. The story is told from the perspective of Noel Strachan, one of the trustees of the trust for Miss Paget’s benefit, a London solicitor, who is also an interesting character. Thrilled to have started my 2023 reading journey on this high note.… (mais)
 
Assinalado
bschweiger | 138 outras críticas | Feb 4, 2024 |
Nevil Shute was an Englishman who left Britain for Australia. He was an aeronautical engineer who turned to novel writing, novels with settings in the air world. So, when he came to write an apocalyptic novel, it was quite authorative from a technical point of view. The life of an Australian community as it awaits the arrival of what will probably be totally fatal clouds of nuclear fallout is quite well done.
 
Assinalado
DinadansFriend | 175 outras críticas | Jan 27, 2024 |
Howard, (actually only approaching 70, but old by the standards of the day) sits in his London club recounting his story to another club member while an air raid thunders around then. Struggling to come to terms with the death of his son, Howard had recently decided to take a fishing trip to France, to the Jura. But it's the spring of 1940 and Britain and France are at war with Germany. (With the benefit of hindsight, a holiday abroad seems a ludicrous idea, but in the spring of 1940, to a man whose experience of war was based on WWI, perhaps less so.) But as the weeks pass the military situation looks more and more ominous and Howard decides that he should return to England. On the eve of his departure, a fellow guest, Mrs Cavanagh, asks a favour of him: will he take her two young children back to England to stay with her sister? The Cavanagh's home is Geneva, where the husband works for the League of Nations, but there have been rumours of a German invasion there so Mrs Cavanagh has brought the children to the safety of France. But now it seems that France is not safe either, so as Mrs Cavanagh does not want to leave her husband, will Mr Howard not take them? And perhaps everything would have been well, but the youngest child, Sheila, falls ill upon the journey, and the ensuing delay means that Howard and his charges are overtaken by the German blitzkrieg. And like the eponymous pied piper, soon it isn't just the two children that Howard is shepherding across a collapsing France....

This is a quiet story of a decent man doing the best he can in extraordinary circumstances, which doesn't shy away from some of the horrors of war:

Their rest finished, he led them out upon the road again. To encourage them upon the way he broke one of the chocolate bars accurately into four pieces and gave it to them. Three of the children took their portion avidly. The fourth shook his head dumbly and refused. ‘Merci, monsieur,’ he whispered. The old man said gently in French: ‘Don’t you like chocolate, Pierre? It’s so good.’ The child shook his head. ‘Try a little bit.’ The other children looked on curiously. The little boy whispered: ‘Merci, monsieur. Maman dit que non. Seulement après déjeuner.’ For a moment the old man’s mind went back to the torn bodies left behind them by the roadside covered roughly with a rug; he forced his mind away from that. ‘All right,’ he said in French, ‘we’ll keep it, and you shall have it after déjeuner.’ He put the morsel carefully in a corner of the pram seat, the little boy in grey watched with grave interest. ‘It will be quite safe there.’


Published in 1942, it's difficult to imagine this sort of book being written now. I can't help thinking that an equivalent would have an overly saccharine ending. I think I first read this when I was about 13 or so - I didn't think that I would remember it but certain episodes came back very clearly, so it obviously made an impression. Recommended.
… (mais)
 
Assinalado
SandDune | 36 outras críticas | Jan 25, 2024 |

Listas

1960s (1)
1950s (2)

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Estatísticas

Obras
53
Also by
29
Membros
18,365
Popularidade
#1,193
Avaliação
3.9
Críticas
645
ISBN
774
Línguas
20
Marcado como favorito
73

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