The Chequer Board

The story tells of the experiences of one John (Jackie) Turner, whom the doctors have given just one year to live as a result of a severe head injury sustained when the aircraft in which he was travelling was attacked by a German fighter in the Second World War.

The men were: As the story unfolds, the reader learns that charges against Lesurier were dropped after an Army investigation and that he later returned to the English town near which he was stationed during the war.

The book's title is taken from Stanza XLVIX of Edward FitzGerald's Rubáiyát of Khayyám: 'Tis all a Chequer-board of Nights and Days Where Destiny with Men for Pieces plays: Hither and thither moves, and mates, and slays, And one by one back in the Closet lays.

The initial idea for The Chequer Board came about when Shute came across the book A Rising Wind (1945) by the American civil rights campaigner Walter White.

[3] Shute drew on the outbreak of racial violence in 1943 involving American soldiers stationed in the village of Bamber Bridge, Lancashire, in Northern England.