South by Java Head

Infobox Book
name = South by Java Head
title_orig =
translator =


image_caption = 1961 Fontana paperback edition
author = Alistair MacLean
illustrator =
cover_artist =
country = United Kingdom
language = English
series =
genre = World War II Novel
publisher = Collins
release_date = 1958
media_type = Print (Hardcover & Paperback)
pages = 254 pgs
isbn = NA
preceded_by = The Guns of Navarone
followed_by = The Last Frontier

South by Java Head is a novel written by Scottish author Alistair MacLean, and was first published in 1958. MacLean's personal experiences in the Royal Navy during World War II provided part of the basis for the story.

Plot introduction

Set in Battle of Singapore in February 1942, just as the burning city of Singapore is about to fall to the Imperial Japanese Army, a tramp steamer slips out of the harbor into the South China Sea containing a desperate and disparate group of people, each with a secret for which they are willing to kill in order to keep safe. The Japanese are the villains, of course, the novel being set in World War II, and the protagonists are a group of mixed civilians and English military personnel: a dissolute Englishman, an elegant Dutch planter, a strangely beautiful Eurasian girl, a Malay slave trader and a mysterious man named Nicholson who is never without his gun. As with any MacLean novel, no one is exactly who they initially seem to be, and the story is filled with secret documents, double agents, traitors, and romantic subplots, not to mention repeated attacks from the Japanese.

"The shattered city of Singapore is surrendering to the advancing Japs. Picking their way through the smoking rubble towards the quay are a struggling party of refugees - soldiers, nurses and civilians. Dawn sees them far out to sea but with the first murderous dive bombers already aimed at their ship. Thus begins an ordeal few are to survive, a nightmare succession of disasters wrought by the hell-bent Japs, the unrelenting tropical sun and by the survivors themselves, whose hatred and bitterness divides them one against the other." - from back cover of 1961 Fontana edition