It's always nice to read about the kindness of strangers. There were also some good side characters that helped them. I also enjoyed following their route across France as they zigzag toward safety to try and elude the Nazis. I liked how Howard comes out of his shell when he makes it his life's purpose to protect the children. This is also a survival story, which I always enjoy. I do love reading about the lives of ordinary people during the wars. The small party begins to increase as more and more children join Howard and he attempts to get them all to safety. Meanwhile, thousands of people are attempting to evacuate before the arrival of the Nazis. Trains stop running, luggage goes missing, and Howard is forced to keep finding alternate routes to get back to England. The younger child, Sheila, becomes feverish and the party is forced to spend the night in a hotel. It seems like a relatively easy task to take a train to Dijon and then to Paris, but Howard underestimates the difficulty of traveling with children, and the rapid escalation of the invasion. The children's parents are alarmed at the speed of the invasion, and beg him to take the children with him back to England, to stay with relatives. Gradually Howard befriends the family, and after the fall of Dunkirk, decides it's best to go home to England. Young Sheila and Robbie are on holiday but normally attend school in Geneva, where their father is working for the League of Nations. Howard had hoped to have no reminders of the war, which seems very far away, and is mildly annoyed to find British tourists staying at the same small hotel.

He's unable to help with the war effort due to health issues, and in early spring of 1940, has cabin fever and decides to go on a fishing holiday in France, in a small town near the Swiss border, near the Jura mountains. The protagonist, John Howard, is a widower, bereft after the loss of his only son, an RAF pilot. They are forced to stay during an air raid, and the older man relates his tale of a recent escape from the Nazi invasion of France, just after the fall of Dunkirk. It begins a framing device: an anonymous narrator meets an elderly man one night after dining in his London club. Published in 1942, Pied Piper is set in 1940. Though he's most famous now for his books set in Australia, Shute started writing in the 1920s, and more than half his novels were written before he moved there in 1950. Though I never got around to writing a post, I enjoyed it so much I read two more of his books before the end of the year. I started with one of his most famous works, A Town Like Alice. I started reading Nevil Shute last year because I intended to review one of his books for the 2019 Back to the Classics Challenge.

Pied piper by nevil shute