The Breaking Wave

The Breaking Wave is a novel by the English writer Nevil Shute, published in 1955 under that title in the United States and as Requiem for a Wren in Britain. It is a war novel told from after the war, about what the fighting cost the people who survived it.

Alan Duncan returns to his family's prosperous sheep station in Australia, having studied at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, flown as a pilot in the war and lost both feet in an air crash. He comes home a lawyer, recently called to the bar in England, to parents who are glad to have him. His arrival is spoiled by the apparent suicide of their housekeeper, a young Englishwoman called Jessie Proctor.

Convinced that she must have hidden her personal papers somewhere in the house, Alan searches for them and finds a small suitcase of letters, diaries and a passport. From them he learns that the woman the household knew as Jessie Proctor was in fact Janet Prentice, a former Royal Navy Wren, and that her history is bound up both with the war and with his own family.