PUBLIC LIBRARIES

Evening Post, Volume CXXX, Issue 150, 21 December 1940, Page 21

PUBLIC LIBRARIES

BOOKS OF THE WEEK

The City Librarian has chosen "Mr. Lucton's Freedom," by Francis Brett Young, as the book of the week, and has furnished the following review:—

"Mr. Lucton's Freedom" is by no means one of Mr. Brett Young's more serious novels; it is written well within his powers, and rather light-heartedly. [The theme is the desire to shake off the trammels of society. Mr. Lucton, the middle-aged hero of the book, is building up a flourishing business, into which he has taken his son, a twenty-four-year-old hustler, who is anxious to bring the -work up to a pitch of well-oiled efficiency. Mr. Lucton feels as though he is being placed on the shelf. It is much the same at home. His wife is a smart woman, who dresses and acts as though she were much younger than she is, and insists on driving him from his comfortable home into a big barn of a place, with an army of inside and outside servants." He feels old and out of it all. One sop is left to him, his high-powered car, but unfortunately he drives it over a bank, contrives to escape from it, and with the purchase money of the house in his pocket, decides on striking out for himself. He then begins an idyllic tour of the. country-side, acquiring and .losing ruck-sacks, falling in with elderly clerks and aristocratic young woman, and finally coming to rest as odd-job man iri a cottage of two elderly ladies who have been, kind to him. He paints the house and is generally useful to them, and when the investments from which they draw their income fail, there is a use at hand for the purchase money which he has been carrying about with him. When he finally returns home he is in some; measure rejuvenated, and one feels that there is more than a possibility that he will grimly assume the helm both at home and at the office. RECENT LIBRARY ADDITIONS. Other . titles selected from recent accession lists are as follows:—General: "Greenhorn in Africa," by R. Courtney; j "Lightning. Ridge," by I. L. Idriess; "What Happened Next," by E. M. Smythe. Fiction: "Their Own Country," by A. T. Hobart; "Mr.1 Bunting," by R. Greenwater; "The Ghost House," by N. Berrow. I