Nevil Shute · 1952 · exile

Nevil Shute's 1952 novel, written after his own move to Australia. A London typist watches her grandmother quietly starve to death on a lapsed pension, and uses the money the old woman leaves her to visit distant relations on a sheep station in the Victorian high country. What she finds there is warmth, meat, space, and a Czech refugee doctor cutting timber.

1. 1
   Leicester

   Jennifer Morton's family are in Leicester, in a Britain of rationing, fuel shortages and shabby making-do - the drab post-war England that the whole novel is measured against.

2. 2
   London

   In London her grandmother dies of slow starvation on a pension that has not kept pace with anything - and leaves Jennifer a small sum sent from Australia, with instructions to spend it going to see the Dormans.

3. 3
   Melbourne

   She lands in Melbourne into a country with more food on one breakfast table than she has seen in a year, and a wool boom filling the shops - a shock that the book returns to again and again without ever quite apologising for it.

4. 4
   Merrijig

   At the Dormans' station near Merrijig, below Mount Buller, Jennifer meets Carl Zlinter - a Czech doctor working out his passage in a timber camp, forbidden to practise, and quietly doing it anyway when men are hurt.

5. 5
   The Howqua River

   Up the Howqua, in the bush around an all but vanished gold town, Carl operates on an injured man on a kitchen table with Jennifer assisting - and the question of where either of them will live is settled.