I had a feeling that Mr. Shute was at some disadvantage where I was concerned, inasmuch as I had learned from the jacket [of "No Highway"] that, beside being a successful author, he was also an aeronautical engineer, a subject of which I am deeply ignorant and hence, perhaps, defensively critical. I quickly discovered that Nevil Shute can write lucidly and dramatically about the study of aeronautics. Indeed, for me this material turned out to be the most pleasurable part of the book.

"No Highway" has as its part-time narrator a likable young Englishman named Scott, who is in charge of the Structural Department of the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough, where highly-trained, assorted physicists, some of them nuclear, are engaged in subjecting aircraft to all imaginable stresses and strains. Among his staff was Theodore Honey, a shabby, unworldly, absent-minded, meek, stubborn prototype of all the bemused professors...