Totally unexpected story. Unsure how it works in with the title but I enjoyed. ( )

The suspense was just right. There were a few areas which were kind of ponderous, but I never got lost. A great story. ( )

That's good - in a very Shute style. The investigation of technical matters relating to airplane safety - in this case, metal fatigue (very little understood at the time) leading to the tail of a particular type of aircraft literally falling off in the air - is the basis of the story; not a subject I know anything about, but I understood the matter probably as well as the narrator did (he says, multiple times, that he's not able to truly understand it but he trusts the researcher who does). Then the scientific facts (well, theories, at that point) run into personalities and politics and finances and on and on, and things get complicated. It's an odd story from several angles - there's at least two protagonists on the airplane side, and two more on the romance side (oh yeah, there's a romance. Or two, or one and a half...). And it's possibly the best depiction I've seen of the way work doesn't wait until you're done with one thing to present you with another! Fun story, well-written (of course), worth reading and likely worth rereading in a couple years. ( )

A lot of technical stuff about airplanes mixed with lots of human interest. Shute often writes about airplanes, and it's good knowing that he really knows about them.

BTW, Feminists should probably give this one a miss. In 1948 it seemed to make sense that a brilliant scientist needed a woman to keep his house clean and bring up his daughter properly. ( )

An interesting little story about an aircraft designer who is convinced that a particular plane will crash on a particular date and his journey to stop that from happening.

Another British novel that has undertones of class and expectations. A good read. ( )