A Town Like Alice in Around the World

Feb 11, 2018 Jenny (Reading Envy) rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: location-malaya, own, around-the-world, location-malaysia, read2018, international-book-club, location-australia

This month's bookclub pick, A Town Like Alice by Nevil Shute, starts in England with an aging attorney setting up a trust. Most of the story follows Jean Paget, who spent most of World War II in Malaya as a prisoner of the Japanese. The journey after the war is the best part. It's a slow journey to get there, but paid off. Warning - there are some racist comments in here that seem a bit harsh even in 1950. ...more

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Sep 02, 2010 KayG rated it really liked it

Sweet story.

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Apr 23, 2010 Lisa (Harmonybites) rated it really liked it

Shelves: libertarian, ebooks, romance, literary-fiction, fiction, novels, before-i-die

This is the story of an extraordinary, ordinary woman, Jean Paget, and how she comes to create "a town like Alice" in the Australian outback. Her story is framed as the first person narrative of her English solicitor, Noel Strachan, who meets her when she comes into an inheritance for which he's the trustee. She tells him about how she led a group of English women made prisoners of war by the Japanese during World War II in Malaysia. That story of survival takes up about half the book. During th ...more

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Oct 11, 2009 Kati Stevens rated it really liked it

I'd probably have given it five stars if it weren't for the bits of timely but hardly forgivable racism and the frame story, which doesn't quite make sense in terms of how much our narrator knows about his heroine/crush. In any event, fantastic, adventure-packed book. Recommended whole-heartedly to men and women of all ages. ...more

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