A Town Like Alice A Town Like Alice A Town Like Alice (United States title: "The Legacy") is a romance novel by Nevil Shute, published in 1950 when Shute had newly settled in Australia. Jean Paget, a young Englishwoman, becomes romantically interested in a fellow prisoner of World War II in Malaya, and after liberation emigrates to Australia to be with him, where she attempts, by investing her substantial financial inheritance, to generate economic prosperity in a small outback community — to turn it into "a town like Alice" i.e. Alice Springs. The story falls broadly into three parts. In Post-World War II London,
A Town Like Alice have to leave the town to find work in the bigger cities. Having worked with a firm in Britain that produced crocodile-leather luxury goods, she gets the idea of founding a local workshop to make shoes from the skins of crocodiles hunted in the outback. With the help of Joe and of Noel Strachan, who releases money from her inheritance, she starts the workshop, followed by a string of other businesses; an ice-cream parlour, a public swimming pool and shops. The third part of the book shows how Jean's entrepreneurship gives a decisive economic impact to develop Willstown into "a