Pastoral
Nevil Shute's 1944 novel, written while the war it describes was still being fought. Peter Marshall captains a Wellington bomber from an English airfield; Gervase Robertson is a WAAF signals officer. The romance is quiet and the flying is not, and Shute, an aeronautical engineer by profession, writes the operational detail with unusual authority. The fishing expedition that gives the book its title is the point: the ordinary life the crews keep hold of between operations.