I agree that Nevil Shute is a terrific storyteller - I have the complete set of his published works and have read all of them more than once. "No Highway" is a great tale, with a supernatural element (the ouija board used to find the crash site) which Shute introduced into many of his books
some of his other books prophesied events which have gone close to the way he wrote of them.
However in "
In the Wet" Shute got it almost completely wrong. Britain in the 80's is strongly socialist (we had Maggie!), the population had collapsed to 30 million because of mass emigration (he totally failed to foresee immigration), you could buy a house for £5 (!) and a right wing Australia (they had a Labor government) is strongly royalist to the extent that the Queen goes to live there. Still, future tellers in literature rarely get it right, and it's a great tale, with aviation at its centre as is often the case with Shute's novels.