Trustee from the Toolroom

Resumen del libro

Keith and Katie Stewart live in a heavily mortgaged house in the London suburb of Ealing. Katie works at a department store while Keith makes tiny models of engines and clocks and other mechanical contrivances in his basement workshop, and writes about them for the magazine Miniature Mechanic. Into their childless life a 10-year-old niece, Janice, comes to stay while her parents sail halfway round the world to make a new life on Vancouver Island. But disaster strikes: the parents are drowned and their entire estate is lost, buried in the cement keel of a boat wrecked on an island in the south Pacific.

Armed with only a hundred pounds, one of his tiny models and Katie's advice ("You must buy a pith helmet"), Keith sets out to recover Janice's inheritance. Along the way, Trustee offers us the richest cast of characters of any of Shute's books: industrialist Chuck Ferris and his nymphomaniac daughter; lumber magnate Sol Hirzhorn and his family; literature professor and closet model maker Cyrus Shawn O'Leary; and Jack Donelly, the slow-witted lusty sailor seeking his mother's home in "the Islands."