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Paperback Old Captivity Book

ISBN: 0330104195

ISBN13: 9780330104197

Old Captivity

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Format: Paperback

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$9.39
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Book Overview

"Keeps you pegging away, page after page, unwilling to put the book down." - New York Times "Mr. Shute knows how to pick astonishing stories and how to keep them moving on non-stop tracks." - New Republic "Excellent entertainment, varied and unusual." - Basil Davenport, Saturday Review of Literature Donald Ross is a young pilot, out of work and in desperate need of a job. So, despite the extreme danger involved, he jumps at the chance to fly Oxford professor Cyril Lockwood and his daughter Alix to the frozen wilds of Greenland to study Viking ruins. But the perils of the journey are nothing compared to what will happen when they arrive. Ignoring the warnings of the terrified natives, who believe the ruins are haunted, the explorers set up camp there and undergo a strange and mystical experience that will lead to a discovery that none of them could ever have foreseen . . . One of the best-loved novels by Nevil Shute, An Old Captivity (1940) blends romance and aeronautical adventure with a unique and compelling strain of fantasy into a page-turning story with an extraordinary conclusion. This edition, the first to be published in America in decades, features a new introduction by Rob Spence. This description may be from another edition of this product.

Customer Reviews

4 customer ratings | 4 reviews

Rated 5 stars
Shute never disappoints....

An Old Captivity is an overlapping tale of what Shute began in Vinland the Good. Shute's stories can be considered quaint, or old fashioned, by some, but in today's rushed society his characters are refreshingly dedicated to their trade/duties, and well thought out in their actions. This story is about an air adventure to seek archaeological data in a remote area of Greenland with just the right amount of reality to make...

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Rated 4 stars
Wanted More

I enjoyed every bit of this story, but it wanted more. More of an ending. More of a wrap-around of set-up plot elements. More expansion on some very critical scenes. And yet, the book as is remains vividly and fondly in memory a couple weeks after reading it. The writing is lovely, the main character soundly developed (secondary characters are somewhat shadowy at times), with a lot of excellent and smoothly written detail...

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Rated 4 stars
The art of disciplined writing

Nevil Shute's style will probably not please the modern reader much, and that is unfortunate. His love of detail and the pains he goes to make sure of what he is stating are characteristics that I enjoy in his texts. Sometimes, he goes to an almost ridiculous extent to flesh out the reality of his background, when it probably would not be missed. Yet just as he does this, you can see him entering a truly fictional world...

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Rated 4 stars
Mystic search for Viking and Irish connection to New England

Initially published in 1940 it is a touching story of a pilot, a scientist and his daughter who in the early 1930's are early North Atlantic aviators as they fly from England to Iceland and on to Greenland to search for evidence that the Irish may have accompanied the Vikings in their year 1000 AD colonies. Nevil Shute combines his incredible love of aviation and his admiration of pilots, with the mysticism which later...

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