NEW NOVELS

Press, Volume LXXVI, Issue 23131, 21 September 1940, Page 5

NEW NOVELS

officer to whom she had become engaged. The story ends with the information that Sister Agatha became godmother to Winifred’s twins. This book is an entertaining portrayal of character and has an interest due to its sustained promise of a startling denouement, which never comes.

DERBYSHIRE BACKGROUND Louise. By Nora K. Smith. Hodder and Stoughton. 311 pp. (9/- net.) From \V. S. Smart.

Louise is a fortunate woman and deserves to be. Money, fame, travel, and a good deal less to do: these things, her husband says to her at the end of the story, she might want; “Don't you envy Elizabeth and Hugh and Maurice?”

“Not when I’ve you and Danny and the farm and the moor and peace. I’m a wealthy woman, Dan,” she says; and since Dan counts his own as riches .enough, on similar terms, they are/ as he says, a wealthy pair. In substance, the story is that of the contrasted characters, wishes, and fulfilments of three Derbyshire sisters, .of whom Louise is one. It is well filled, well composed, a happy book but not shallow; and the Derbyshire rural background is delightfully drawn, MOKE JANE

Jane the Popular. By Evadne Pncc. Illustrated by Frank Grey. Robert Hale. 348 pp. (4s 6d.) Through Whitcombe and Tombs Ltd.

Jane, the heroine of a number of tomboyish tales, has become well known for her outrageous behaviour in Little Duppery s normally quiet lanes and gardens. Though this is a book about childien, it is distinctly not a book for children whose mothers are trying to encourage them to be gentle and well behaved. Jane Turpin’s mother and sister strive to have her voted the most popular child in Little Duppery; Jane, on the contrary, has no thought but. to continue her habitually energetic life with her village contemporaries, Pug and Chaw, the dread of all other children in the district and the despair of every adult. Jane does become the most popular child in Little Duppery; but on her progress towards this honourable .position she enrages in turn every social and political party and almost every individual in the village.

FOREIGN AND FAMILY AFFAIRS Dust Before the Wind. By Joan Sutherland. Cassell. 376 pp.

Reluming lo England on the death o. her German husband t Astrid von Zollern was much troubled by her reading of the character of her father’s second wife, Myra. Her anxiety deepened as she studied the relations between Myra, and the sinister German, Joseph Steck: for Astrid’s father was Sir John Hereford. the Foreign Secretary .... Equally .anxious, Myra’s brother Victor, who acted as Sir John’s private secretary, partnered Astrid m her watch upon developments and in the quick, desperate action that was necessary to save Myra, a gambler made desperate by a villain. from betraying British secrets to the enemy. It hardly needs saying that this triumphant partnership in family and foreign affairs is romantically completed.

FENCING MASTER The Marquis of Carabas. By Rafael Sabatini. Hutchinson. 384 pp. (9/6 net.)

Mr Sabatini’s romance, set in the later stages of the French revolutionary period, uses characteristic machinery with characteristic merit. Established as London’s most famous and most fashionable fencing master, Quentin de Morlaix might have been happy in a humdrum exile. But he encountered the exquisite Mademoiselle de Chesnieres and fell in love with her; he became deeply involved, consequently,' in personal and political adventure of, great peril; and one' of the sources both of peril and of perplexity to the lovers whs that the Marquisate of Chavaray, which the . Chesnieres family held, Quentin believed to be rightfully his. Much of the action lies in Brittany, where General Lazare Hoche, a fascinating character'' ' ‘swiftly sketched, faces the counter-revolu-tion of the Chouans.

TRAGIC EYE-WITNESS Europe to Let. By Storm Jameson. Macmillan. 383 pp. Miss Jameson’s novel is the tragedy of Europe’s last 20 years. It reaches personal, dramatic form as the narrative of Esk, an ‘‘obscure man,” whose business journeys made him an eye-witness of the postwar German ferment, of the seizure of Austria, of the Nazification cl Hungary, of the “hour of Prague.

STORM JAMESON Every episode is admirably, horribly designed to exhibit the rising power of evil, the suppression and defeat of the idealistic dreamer standing in its way, the disaster of compromise, the fate of the common victim. This novel is history, but history m which every statement of fact is brought home to the reader’s intelligence and imagination. MIGRATION The Torguls. By W. L. River. Angus and Robertson. 438 pp. (8/6.) The Torguls were a Mongolian tribe that settled in Russia. In the reign of the Empress Catherine 11, the Torgut (or Torgod) chiefs found her rule so oppressive that, in 1771, they fled, with 70,000 families, eastward into Asia. The hardships the migrants suffered were incredible. After a journey of eight months they reached the neighbourhood of the Tian Shan mountains, where they settled in the province of Hi by invitation of the Chinese. They no longer exist as a separate people, for they have been absorbed into the Chinese race. Mr River’s novel has as its theme the romantic wanderings of tnis hardy tribe. He has written the story on an epic scale, with much dramatic action . and numerous characters. By these means he. has made the sufferings and heroism pf these remote and obscure wanderers live again. Readers who like a wholesome and unusual novel will enjoy this attractive romance.

THE NOBLE GIRL Love or Money. .By Rob Eden. Robert Hale. 248 pp. (8/-.) Through Whitcombe and Tombs Ltd.

Brenda.Fayre had two reasonsfor wanting to leave her job with Jason Enterprises:, she suspected that the enterprises' were crooked, and she did not want to marry Walter Jason But she hung on, for the sake of the money that would buy back health for her crippled sister Rally; she hung on, though she was sacrificing to her sister, top, her love for the penniless young , writer, Val Sargent. Mr Eden fixes things, however, for the noble v girl* a, pathetic death, justice for Jason, and brilliant success for the author of “Story of Maizie,” and there you are.

The librarian of the Canterbury Public Library reports that volumes added to the' biography section .recently include “The. Emperor Charles V,” by Karl Brandi; “The Life and Death of Conder, by John Rothenstein; “Sea Urchin,” the life of a serio-comic adventurer, by Rhys Davies; and “What Mussoiini Did to Us.” by Paolo Treves. . ' , Fiction accessions have included such first-rank detective stories, as R A. J. Walling’s “Why Did Treth p wy Die?” and E. T. Gardner’s “The Case of the Rolling Bones ’ and “Golden Ashes,” by F. W.