"Somehow, by the magic of his words, Mr. Walpole, in his portrayal of a people in the process of evolving, makes his readers understand better what has taken place in Russia than political experts in many an analytical treatise."--Springfield Union.
"One of the best sustained, most continuously interesting and dramatic stories Mr. Walpole has written."--New York Globe.
"It is his best work as a piece of literature and it is his most important as an ethical, sociological and political study."--New York Tribune.
JEREMY
The real beauty, tenderness and gaiety of childhood is an elusive thing--too elusive often to be caught and pressed into words. By some magic of his own Hugh Walpole has made live again in Jeremy the childhood that we all knew and that we turn back to with infinite longing.
With affectionate humorousness, Mr. Walpole tells the story of Jeremy and his two sisters, Helen and Mary Cole, who grow up in Polchester, a quiet English Cathedral town. There is the Jam-pot, who is the nurse; Hamlet, the stray dog; Uncle Samuel, who paints pictures and is altogether "queer"; of course, Mr. and Mrs. Cole, and Aunt Amy.
Mr. Walpole has given his narrative a rare double appeal, for it not only recreates for the adult the illusion of his own happiest youth, but it unfolds for the child-reader a genuine and moving experience with real people and pleasant things. No child will fail to love the birthday in the Cole household, the joyous departure for the sea and the country in the long vacation.
"A story of the most human elements, tender, witty, penetrating in a breath. It is the study of one year in a boy's life.... Mr. Walpole goes straight to the heart of the child for his inspiration, and never strays outside the narrow limits of a child's experience. It is 'the real thing,' wonderfully remembered, and most sympathetically and unaffectedly recorded."--Daily Telegraph.
THE DARK FOREST
Out of Russia, where Hugh Walpole had been serving with the Russian Red Cross, came this strange, wonderful, exotic book, containing an inexplicable treasure of beauty,--the glamour of the Russian forest, the scent of blossoming orchards, the wistful heroism of young Russian soldiers. The Dark Forest would be an astonishing performance if only in this--that Walpole has conceived and written a Russian novel in English. But there are scenes that are the most vividly realized moments of which Walpole has ever written. Scenes which the Westminster Gazette calls "the equal of the most dramatic passages in English fiction." Mystical, poetical, spiritual, the theme of The Dark Forest is the triumph of the soul over death. One may read in it an allegory of the soul of Russia.