[1] In this novel, Shute has some harsh things to say about the new (British) National Health Service, as well as the socialist Labour government, themes he would later develop more fully in In the Wet.

Jennifer Morton, a young girl from Leicester but living in London, witnesses the death of her grandmother, the widow of a retired Indian civil servant.

She also meets Carl Zlinter, a 'New Australian'; a Czech refugee who is working at the nearby lumber camp of a timber company as a condition of his free passage to Australia.

Jennifer helps Zlinter to trace the history of a man of the same name who lived and died in the district many years before, during a gold rush, and they find the site of his house.

The character of Carl Zlinter may have been inspired by Dr Marcus Clarke, whom Nevil Shute accompanied in 1948 on his rounds as a country doctor in Cairns, Australia.

Writing in The Bulletin a reviewer was rather unimpressed with the work: "As an ingenious stringing-together of a varied set of subjects of present-day interest, it is more readable than a series of articles would be ; as a novel, it makes good journalism.