5 FEBRUARY 1960, Page 17

THE GREAT FORTUNE

SIR,—When your reviewer, Mr. John Coleman, says of my new novel that 'a sense of direction—the why of a novel—is conspicuously, fatally absent,' I can- not help feeling that he, like one or two other re- viewers of this book, has overlooked the foreword explaining that The Great Fortune is the first volume of a trilogy. In the second and third volumes the relationships will, of course, develop much further, revealing, I hope, both direction and purpose.—Yours faithfully,

OLIVIA MANNING 26 Queen's. Grove, St. John's Wood, NW8