But it is more than just about bloodshed. they don’t know what it was like, not being in a camp.” ~ Nevil Shute, A Town Like AliceĪ Town Like Alice is a mirror of the Second World War, of how it impacted the lives of normal individuals. “People who spent the war in prison camps have written a lot of books about what a bad time they had, she said quietly, staring into the embers. During, her visit to the village that adopted her, she was greeted with a very welcome news that will once again reset her world and her life. When, post-war, Jean received a shocking inheritance from an uncle she barely knew, she returned to the village to repay them for their kindness. In the village, the surviving women and children thrived with the locals. With no accommodate more prisoners of war, Paget and her group was forced to March all over the peninsula to find a prison that will take them in.Īfter marching for hundred of miles and after many have perished, the group found reprieve in a small Malayan village which took them in their fold despite the fear of reprisal from the daunting Japaneses soldiers.

Together with a group of women, Jean was captured by the Japanese army. Jean Paget, a secretary in a leather goods factory in the Malayan Peninsula (present-day Malaysia), found herself caught in crossfire of the war. It is a story of how they survived and eventually restored and rebuilt their lives from what the fragments of the war. In Nevil Shute’s literary tour-de-force, A Town Like Alice, he weaves the story of a set of characters who chose to rise above their abhorrent experiences during the height of the Second World War. Like phoenixes rising from the ashes after 500-years, their are those amongst us who roar back at life, never shackled by the pains of the past. Rising above the din are stories of survival, of hope, of courage and of rising above the circumstances. But war stories are not always about violence and bloodshed. It is from these printed works that we learn and understand the way in which wars have shaped our modern landscape. In countless a literary work, the horrors of war have been immortalized.

A town like alice book review