How do you select the books you read? For me, reviews certainly influence what I buy, especially those in the weekend edition of the Financial Times or Sunday’s New York Times.  Advertisements on bookselling websites have no sway whatsoever and I’m almost allergic to the clumsy “if you liked this, you’ll love this” trick that the likes of Amazon.com seem to think is so clever and influential.  Serendipity plays an occasional part, as does the guidance of friends, many of whom are voracious readers.  Their tastes and mine don’t seem to overlap very much but I’m always keen to hear what they recommend.  When one of those friends gave me A Town Like Alice for my birthday and said it was one of her all-time favorites, I was intrigued to read it.  Other than a vague awareness of it and its author, Nevil Shute, I knew nothing.

I can see now why my friend thinks so highly of it. The story it tells is a powerful one and its impact is all the greater because Shute’s style is so readable.  In some respects it’s clearly a product of the late 1940s, not least in its uncomfortable descriptions of the Japanese in Malaya during the Second World War and of the Australian aborigines in the years immediately after. But it’s far more than a quaint and entertaining period piece.  The character of Jean Paget, moving as she does from the drudgery of wartime London to the cruelties of detention in occupied Malaya and then to the Australian outback in the years after the conflict, is an extraordinary precursor of the strong, independent women everyone takes for granted in fiction today.