Translated from the French by A. R. Allinson, M.A.
⁂ Of the newer French novelists Marcelle Tinayre is perhaps the best known. Her work has been crowned by the French Academy, and she possesses a very large public in Europe and in America. The story deals with a girl's love and a heroic sacrifice dictated by love. "The Shadow of Love" is a book of extraordinary power, uncompromising in its delineation of certain hard, some might say repulsive facts of life, yet instinct all through with an exquisitely tender and beautiful passion of human interest and human sympathy.
BY GEORGE VANE.
THE LIFTED LATCH: A Novel. Crown 8vo. 6/-
⁂ "The Lifted Latch" is a story of strong situations. The hero is the son of an Italian attaché and a girl of whose frailty he takes advantage. The mother decides to hide her shame by handing the child over to a foster-mother together with a sum of money for its maintenance. When the boy grows up he becomes by a curious sequence of events and circumstances reunited to his parents, and a series of plots and counterplots follow. The scene is set principally in diplomatic circles in Rome.
THE LOVE DREAM. Crown 8vo. 6/-
⁂ In this book we meet some Sicilians of old lineage and considerable wealth settled in a gloomy manor in England. The family consists of an aged and partly demented Princess, obsessed by a monomania for revenge, her grandson, an attaché of the Italian Embassy to the Court of St. James, and his half sister, a fascinating, winning, wayward and fickle creature. This girl captures the heart of Lord Drury—whose father murdered the Principe Baldassare di Monreale—son of the old Princess. The contrast between these Southerners and their English neighbours is strongly accentuated. Don Siorza and his half sister Donna Giacinta are no mere puppets with Italian names; they give the reader the impression of being people the author has met and drawn from life. The tragedy in which they are involved strikes one as inevitable. Poor Lord Drury, in his utter inexperience, has taken a beautiful chimæra for reality and starts in the pursuit of happiness when it was all the time within his grasp. The love-interest never flags to the last page when the hero's troubles come to an end. The glimpses of diplomatic circles in London are obviously not written by an outsider.
Truth—"Well constructed ... thrilling scenes and situations fit naturally and consequently into the framework of its elaborate plot."
BY CLARA VIEBIG.