While I enjoyed reading it, I can see it may be somewhat dry to a person not interested in engineering, and with the engineering subject matter being now 70 years outdated, the book is a bit awkward today. It is, however, a well-crafted novel just like I would have expected from Nevil Shute. I can’t figure out why the book is called No Highway, as it does, at least to me, not relate to the story at all. All hinges on the results of his experiments and the recovery of crash data from a remote site in the Canadian Labrador forests.

Only through drastic action that jeopardizes his career does he get the attention of the aerospace establishment. But being somewhat goofy and off-mainstream, many people don’t believe Honey. He discovers an esoteric problem with the tail structure of the Reindeer, the U.K.’s most modern passenger airplane of the time that was just put into cross-Atlantic service. Honey, an awkward, introverted, but brilliant engineer who does advanced work in fatigue studies in metallurgy. Scott, a young manager in the government agency responsible for aircraft safety in the U.K. These books were all recommended by my Australian friend (and frequent commenter in this blog), Ray Cullen. I read Trustee from the Toolroom in 2014 and A Town Like Alice in 2015. His most celebrated novels include Pied Piper (1942), A Town Like Alice (1950), and On the Beach (1957).After reading a few books that I did not enjoy very much for a variety of reasons, I picked up No Highway by Nevil Shute because I knew, having read the author before, that he is a good story teller and will present a solidly crafted novel. After the war he continued to write and settled in Australia where he lived until his death in 1960. During the Second World War he joined the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve where he worked on developing secret weapons. In 1931 he married Frances Mary Heaton and they had two daughters. In his spare time he began writing and he published his first novel, Marazan, in 1926, using the name Nevil Shute to protect his engineering career. Following his childhood passion, he entered the fledgling aircraft industry as an aeronautical engineer working to develop airships and, later, airplanes.

He studied Engineering Science at Balliol College, Oxford. Nevil Shute Norway was born in 1899 in Ealing, London. En route to Canada Theodore learns he is flying in a Reindeer and is in danger. The scientist is sent to the scene of the crash. When a new transatlantic plane, the Reindeer, is found to have crashed in Labrador, Theodore believes he knows why. Sinopsis Theodore Honey is a scientist with an interest in the paranormal and a job testing metal fatigue in aircraft.