There can be no doubt about it; this is a noteworthy book, a beautifully written book and--what is best of all--a book with a backbone. You may like it or you may not; you will be unable, we believe, to withhold admiration.--From a review in _The New York Sun_. "Hugh Walpole has proved his right to eminence. _The Secret City_ is a worthy successor to _The Dark Forest_. His art in presentation is consummate. But the trait that stands out in his writings is his humanity."--_Chicago Daily News_. "This is, we believe, Mr. Walpole’s best novel, a finer book even than _The Dark Forest_. Its descriptive passages are many of them superb; we get the sense of the strange and alien forces lying beneath the somewhat Europeanized surface of Petrograd in a truly remarkable way."--_New York Times_. "It is one of Mr. Walpole’s achievements in this book that along with his philosophic study of Russian minds and matters, he maintains a running, throbbing story of the romance-tragedy of the Markovitch home. Its form and style confirm it in a place of great literary distinction. Being the sort of book one desires to keep as well as to read, it sustains the final test of a fictional work."--_New York World_. "Hugh Walpole has equalled himself at his best and far surpassed himself at his second best. A novel of the rare sort that is meant for the delight of discriminating readers."--_Washington Star_. "The best recommendation of his novel is its excellent quality as a story: its absorbing interest in character."--_Boston Herald_. "The story is tensely dramatic in its incidents and situations, its characters are real and interesting.... You cannot merely read this book, for if you mean to keep on you must think and keep on thinking."--_San Francisco Chronicle_. "Mr. Walpole is a story-teller with something in him besides fine facility, and it is fascinating to consider this excellent example of his work."--_The New Republic_. "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.