This is the story of an extraordinary, ordinary woman, Jean Paget, and how she comes to create "a town like Alice" in the Australian outback. Her story is framed as the first person narrative of her English solicitor, Noel Strachan, who meets her when she comes into an inheritance for which he's the trustee. She tells him about how she led a group of English women made prisoners of war by the Japanese during World War II in Malaysia. That story of survival takes up about half the book. During that time, a young Australian POW, Joe Harman, helped save them by stealing food and medicine for them. The other half of the book brings her to Australia looking for him.
I've seen a review accuse the book of racism. Not, in my opinion, a fair charge, even if a somewhat understandable one. I think there's a difference between a book that is racist, and one that depicts racism. The book was published in 1950 and the events that take place occur from 1942 to about 1950. The language and attitudes of the characters reflect their time and place, and wouldn't be true to it if they instead reflected contemporary sensibilities. And as for the charge that the way it depicts the Japanese is particularly racist, anyone who thinks the book isn't accurate in that instance, should look up the "Bataan Death March." It wasn't just the Nazis and Soviets who committed atrocities during World War II. I admit it did give me pause later when building a ice cream parlor is discussed and plans are made to build a segregated "coloured annex" without a qualm.
It was simply a different world then, but if you can look past that, there's a bonza tale here that spans continents, a tale of entrepreneurship such as I've rarely seen in fiction, that shows how a town is built by a woman out of the same kind of vision and courage that helped her survive a war. And it's a tale of romance as well--one fulfilled and one poignantly bittersweet.
