Fledgling Post-War Communities in Nevil Shute’s A Town Like Alice and Round the Bend

Abstract

In distinct ways, both A Town Like Alice and Round the Bend explore themes of sustainable economic development and human solidarity. This paper provides a brief background to the strong genealogical link between these two books. It then explores both novels separately in order to see how these sensitive portraits of post-war recovery and economic development in two very different communities make the case for valuing and understanding difference in a nascent post-colonial world. It also considers whether these two exquisite records of life in the 1940s and very early 1950s might be candidates for academic “rubber-stamping.”