18 JANUARY 1919, Page 20

Lillie England. By Sheila Kaye-Smith. (Nisbet and Co. 7s.)— There

is more than a touch of poetry in Miss Kaye-Smith's story of the war seen through the eyes of a farmer's family in Sussex. The book is divided into seven parts, each part dealing with the point of view of one of the characters. The minister of the Particular Baptista, a minister whom Nature intended to be a blacksmith, is the chief person in the final section. The love of the farmer's two boys for the earth, which one of them dies defending and the other tills in a passion of enthusiasm for the land which bore him, is rendered with a poignancy moat illuminating to the town reader. The whole book is redolent of the countryside, a countryside made dignified and dramatic by the great events in which its inhabitants are concerned.