Recent Fiction

THE HIGH BARBAREE -- Charles Nordhoff & James Norman Hall -- Little, Brown ($2). The magic setting of this high romance, in the tradition of James Hilton's Lost Horizon, is a Polynesian Shangrila. It is plainly designed as a refuge for readers who have had enough of wartime realism. Two Navy flyers are floating on the Pacific in a flak-shattered PBY. One of them passes the tedious, hopeless days talking of the lush, tiny island that he dreamed of as a boy. The fish they finally catch must have been poisonous, because Gene, the navigator, dies that night. But Pilot Brooke wakes up to find the island there, just as he had always dreamed it. And when he gets ashore it grows greener and lusher. Seasoned professionals like the team of Nordhoff & Hall know enough to stop when things begin to get too breadfruity.

THE BLACK ROSE -- Thomas B. Costain -- Doubleday, Doran ($3). To write this historical romance Author Costain, a Doubleday editor, read or consulted over 500 books, hired a Chinese scholar and a research worker who could read medieval Latin and French. The background is laid in the murky, turgid England of Roger Bacon, the fabulous silk-&-spice Orient of Kublai Khan. An impoverished young bastard of noble blood leaves Oxford to seek his fortune in far Cathay. Here he meets the Khan's famed general, Bayan of the Hundred Eyes, and forgets the haughty girl at home in favor of the harem slave, Maryam, daughter of a fraternizing English crusader and his Grecian love. Author Costain's romantic actors are hardly more three-dimensional than characters in a high-grade comic strip, but the elaborate 13th-Century stage sets are well painted.

MOST SECRET -- Nevil Shute -- Morrow ($2.50). This slickly competent wartime adventure story is put together on such sound box-office principles that it might do as a cinema vehicle for Errol Flynn. It has all the required ingredients : commando raid, secret agent, love interest, a London blitz, shiny-eyed self-sacrifice, and a gallant English officer who wants to kill Germans because a bomb's blast killed his pet rabbit, Geoffrey. The publishers boast that three of British naval-officer-novelist Shute's last five books (Ordeal, Pied Piper, Pastoral) have been selected by "major book clubs."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.