Without any special heralding, Mr. ERIC LEADBITTER seems to have stepped into the front rank, perhaps even to the leadership, of those active novelists whose theme is English rural life. I emphasize the word "active," with of course a thought for the master of them all, the wizard of Dorchester, at whose feet it would probably be fair to suppose Mr. LEADBITTER to have learnt some at least of his craft. His new story, _Shepherd's Warning_ (ALLEN AND UNWIN), is a quiet tale of life in a not specially attractive village--a tale that conquers by its direct humanity and by an art so delicate and so deftly concealed that the book has a deceptive appearance of having written itself without effort on the part of its author. It concerns a group of peasants, agricultural labourers, inhabitants of Fidding, a village gradually yielding to the encroachments by tram and villa of the neighbouring town. The simple annals of these folk, and especially of one family, old _Bob Garrett_ and his grandsons, provide the matter of a tale gentle as the passage of time itself, never dull, instinct with quality in every line of it. Mr. LEADBITTER has a method of concentration so pronounced that, once let his characters, even his heroine, step outside the beam that he has focussed upon Fidding, and they vanish utterly, till the working (apparently) of fate brings them back again. Even the murder in his early chapters is so lightly touched upon as to produce hardly any effect of violence. His sympathy with the life of the soil, and the human lives that are so near to it, is clearly absorbing; the result is that, to all save the confirmed sensationalist (piqued possibly by the waste of good homicide), _Shepherd's Warning_ will also, I think, prove Reader's Delight. * * * * *