1971

From ATA page:

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It is 1952, the height of the Malayan emergency. As ten men travel through the terrorist-infested jungle, one of them asks the question: "What were you doing ten years ago?" This story answers that question.

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Against a backdrop of the Second World War and the uneasy peace that followed, the pattern of their lives emerges. One man has known and loved the wives of two of his companions; one has fought with the terrorists he now pursues. After years of bitterness and hardship, another is about to find some happiness; a fourth can only face the past through a haze of alcohol.

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But across those ten years their lives have touched. Gradually they are drawn together in a brilliantly complex pattern up to the day of their fateful journey through the jungle.

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From blurb:

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EUROPE, 1942 . . .

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He said, "My mission was to strafe the troop train. Suddenly the station lights went on and showed a milling mass of men . . . and women. I killed them, I killed them all."

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Suddenly he grabbed me, his whole body shaking with sobs, and forced me under him. "Comfort me, Sally, help me. All summer I've been wanting you, dreaming of you. I can't eat, I can't sleep, I can't fly. I can't fly, Sally, help me, make love to me . . ."

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"Using the Bridge of San Luis Rey technique, Sheila Ross presents a rich tapestry of human life and emotions."

--London Evening News

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From rear cover of Five Days Till Noon and The Foam on the River:

The epic Log Across the Road takes a group of men and women of widely differing race and background and weaves their lives together until they find themselves exposed to a common and terrible danger in Malaya at the height of the Emergency. A work of astonishing maturity, it showed not only exceptional powers of characterization, but also a keen eye for country and atmosphere, so that it carries the reader from war-time Britain to Nazi-occupied Holland, from Italy to the fall of Singapore, with total authenticity and sense of period.

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