Lonesome Heights (WARD, LOCK).  These Holts were a race of farmer-squires, and in the book you see their development through two generations:  the masterful old man and his twin sons.  This is all the tale; a simple enough record, but full of the dignity and beauty which make the reading of any story by this author a refreshment to irritated nerves.  Towards the end some space is devoted to the fight to abolish child-labour in the dale mills; there is also a scandal, and the fastening of blame upon the wrong brother; no very great matter.  It is for such scenes as that of the death of old Holt, and his last words to the horse that has thrown him, that Lonesome Heights will earn its place on your library list.

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The Dice of the Gods (HEATH, CRANTON) is not, as the title suggests, something rather thrilling in the way of romantic fiction, but one of those dispassionate novels in which the author, through the medium of his puppets, gently scourges the follies of society. William van der Beck, whose fictional house of clay very obviously clothes the spiritual essence of the author, Mr. LUCIAN DE ZILWA, returns to his native Colombo with a liberal education, to find that the life and thought of the strange Indo-European bourgeoisie to which he belongs by birth present no alluring features.  In point of fact the ambitions and hypocrisies, pretences and prejudices of the Cingalese “burgher” with the tell-tale finger-nails are merely those of Bristol or Amsterdam evolved under Colonial conditions. Jack van der Beck, for example, the pompous medical ass with a flourishing practice among the local nabobs, can be found in every provincial town in Europe. The Dice of the Gods has no plot worthy of the name, but Mr. DE ZILWA has both satire and philosophy at his command, and a flair for atmosphere.  His scenery and “props” too will be new even to the most hardened novel-reader.  He paints a vivid Oriental background with which the semi-Western civilization of his characters alternately blends and contrasts rather effectively.

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Mr. TRESIDDER SHEPPARD’S The Quest of Ledgar Dunstan (DUCKWORTH) is one of those half-sequels of which, while it remains true that You Can Start Here, you will get a better grip with some previous knowledge of the earlier story about the same people.  Not that your hold upon the present book will, even then, be other than slightly precarious.  For my own part I seldom met anything so elusive.  I freely grant that it is original, thoughtful and provocative, but the effect it produces is rather like that of Jaberwocky upon Alice ("It fills me with ideas, only I don’t know what they are!").  At first one seemed in for a comedy of disillusion. Ledgar and Mary, united, are met with in the process of living unhappily ever after.  This is clear enough, human (unfortunately) and amusing.