10 MAY 1930, Page 26

EXILES. By Warwick Deeping. (Cassell. 75. 6d.)— Admirers of Mr.

Deeping's sturdy young _men will be pleased to find their feminine equal in his latest novel. Barbara Brown, who goes to Italy to help a cold-bath devotee to run a library and tea-room, is of the Girl Guide type, hardy and brisk and capable. She is welcomed by a most surprisingly decadent English colony, falls in love, is fallen in love with, and alternately hardens and softens. There is plenty of inci- dent and interest in the story which is written with the , author's usual briskness, but one feels that even, so sensible and fastidious a young woman as Barbara would not have washed her hands of the man she loved quite so speedily, in spite of all that she heard about him. Apart from this rather jarring episode the book is very readable.