HE was a gifted aviation designer and deputy chief engineer to Barnes Wallis, inventor of the bouncing bomb. He established an aircraft factory in York, only to quit the city, thwarted by officialdom. He became a best-selling novelist and moved to the other side of the world.

Now his work has been rediscovered. And thanks to the endeavours of a publisher taking full advantage of the digital age, his name might become familiar to a new generation of readers: Nevil Shute.

Shute's most famous titles are On The Beach, an apocalyptic novel set in a world devastated by nuclear war, and A Town Like Alice, the quest of a Japanese prisoner of war survivor to find her true love. Both were made into films.

Much of Shute's life was dominated by war, which may explain the often bleak vision in his books.

His full name is Nevil Shute Norway. Born in 1899, and educated at Shrewsbury, he served in the Army late in the First World War before completing his education at Oxford University.

He became an aeronautical engineer, working with Barnes Wallis on the design of the airship R100 at Howden, East Yorkshire, which Shute flew to and from Canada.

The crash of its government-sponsored rival the R101, on October 5 1930, with the loss of 46 lives effectively put an end to the project.

Shute then moved to York, setting up Airspeed Ltd. With some of the Howden team, he began designing aircraft and gliders. The company rented half of what was the old Piccadilly trolleybus station.

Airspeed Ltd soon outgrew these premises. But when the York Corporation refused the company assistance, Shute Norway moved the operation down south.

While developing Airspeed he wrote The Lonely Road, published 1931. He flew his own aircraft to Australia to research On The Beach, before settling there permanently.

In the Second World War, Shute was a commander in the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve, working on secret projects

His books are based on his own wartime and aircraft industry experiences, and his love of Australia and its people during war and peacetime. He also wrote an autobiography, Slide Rule. He died in 1960.

Shute is one of Evening Press columnist Bryan Marlowe's favourite authors.

"I read his books through the Forties and Fifties," he said. "His brisk style and vivid word pictures of people and places are, for me, unforgettable.

"He had the clever knack of writing about technical equipment and procedures in a way that they were understandable to his technophobic readers.

"For his descriptive powers, and his ability to move his readers, I would rank him with AJ Cronin and Graham Greene. It was a great pity, and a great loss to literature, that he died so early."

New publisher House Of Stratus is reviving Shute's memory by publishing 22 of his novels plus his autobiography.

This is part of its policy to bring back into print some of the best-selling authors of the 20th century, including crime fiction from Erle Stanley Gardner, the creator of the Perry Mason mysteries, and James Hadley Chase.

More recent signings are the 'grand Master' of science fiction, Brian Aldiss and actress and author Joan Collins, both with a number of re-issued titles as well as new works of fiction for 2001.

So why Nevil Shute? "He is certainly a well- known writer but a great number of his books are now no longer available," says Tim Forrester, commercial director of House Of Stratus.

"He's famous for classics like On The Beach and A Town Like Alice. Second hand copies can reach £500 among collectors.

"We thought he was an author people want to read and that's why we picked him out.

"Using digital technology, we can process very small orders of books. Shops can have an order for 30 Nevil Shutes, or two Nevil Shutes.

"Under normal publishing economics, you have to print several thousand to make it viable."

House Of Stratus staff sometimes have to scour libraries and second-hand bookshops to obtain original copies of books for reissue. Text is scanned on to a computer and digitally stored so that it can be downloaded to demand, printed, bound and distributed from a factory at Thirsk.

The finished volumes look no different than traditionally-produced books. But the trailblazing method would have appealed to Shute, a pioneer of both engineering and literature.

House Of Stratus's full list of titles is on www.houseofstratus.com