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Beyond the Black Stump

Shute, Nevil, 1899-1960. Book - 1956 Fiction 1 On Shelf No requests on this item Community Rating: 4.8 out of 5

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Locations
Call Number: Fiction
On Shelf At: Downtown Library

Location & Checkout Length Call Number Checkout Length Item Status
Downtown 2nd Floor
4-week checkout
Fiction 4-week checkout On Shelf

Originally published in 1956 by William Heinemann Ltd.

COMMUNITY REVIEWS

Frontiersmen, Civilized Men, and Something Like Love submitted by Jan Wolter on August 6, 2013, 4:07pm With Nevil Shute, it's always wise to expect something a little strange, and this love story, one of his lesser known works, is no exception. A young American travels to Australia to drill an exploratory oil well in a remote region of Western Australia. There he meets an eccentric family of ranchers, and the culture clashes begin immediately. As usual in a Shute story, there are no villains, nearly everyone is really nice, but they don't really understand each other, and love by itself may not be enough to bridge the gulf. On the surface the story is about the clash between American and Australian culture (written by a man who was neither really, but had lived in Australia for about six years by the time he wrote this), but in the end the story is really about the difference between frontier people and "civilized" people.

The pace, as always with Shute, is leisurely. Few authors would start a book like this by describing the pleasant vacation the hero took before deciding to go to Australia. Possibly that's because few authors can do as good a job of holding the reader's interest through an episode like that. But Shute has his reasons, and by the end every bit of that episode turns out to be important to the story.

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PUBLISHED
North Yorkshire : House of Stratus, 2000, c1956.
Year Published: 1956
Description: 291 p. ; 21 cm.
Language: English
Format: Book

ISBN/STANDARD NUMBER
184232246X (pbk.) :

SUBJECTS
Australia -- Fiction.