Miss SHEILA KAYE-SMITH continues to be the chronicler and brief abstractor of Sussex country life. Her latest story, _Green Apple Harvest_ (CASSELL), may lack the brilliant focus of _Tamarisk Town_, but it is more genuine and of the soil. There indeed you have the dominant quality of this tale of three farming brothers. Never was a book more redolent of earth; hardly (and I mean this as a compliment) will you close it without an instinctive impulse to wipe your boots. The brothers are _Jim_, the eldest, hereditary master of the great farm of Bodingmares; _Clem_, the youngest, living contentedly in the position of his brother's labourer; and _Bob_, the central character, whose dark and changing fortunes make the matter of the book, as his final crop of tragedy gives to it the at first puzzling title. There is too much variety of incident in _Bob's_ uneasy life for me to follow it in detail. The tale is sad--such a harvesting of green apples gives little excuse for festival--but at each turn, in his devouring and fatal love for the gipsy, _Hannah_, in his abandonment by her, and most of all in his breaking adventures of the soul, now saved, now damned, he remains a tragically moving figure. Miss KAYE-SMITH, in short, has written a novel that lacks the sunshine of its predecessors, but shows a notable gathering of strength. * * * * * Would you not have thought that at this date motor-cars had definitely joined umbrellas and mothers-in-law as themes in which no further humour was to be found? Yet here is Miss JESSIE CHAMPION writing a whole book, _The Ramshackle Adventure_ (HODDER AND STOUGHTON), all about the comical vagaries of a cheap car--a history that, while it has inevitably its dull moments, has many more that are both amusing and full of a kind of charm that the funny-book too often conspicuously lacks. I think this must be because almost all the characters are such human and kindly folk, not the lay figures of galvanic farce that one had only too much reason to expect. For example, the owner of the car is a curate, whose wife is supposed to relate the story, and _George_ has to drive the Bishop in his unreliable machine. Naturally one anticipates (a little drearily) upsets and ditches and episcopal fury, instead of which--well, I think I won't tell you what happens instead, but it is something at once far more probable and pleasant. I must not forget to mention that the cast also includes a pair of engaging lovers whom eventually the agency of the car unites. Indeed, to pass over the lady would display on my part the blackest ingratitude, since among her many attractive peculiarities it is expressly mentioned that she (be still, O leaping heart!) reads the letter-press in _Punch_. * * * * *