NOVELTY ON EARTH

Women may like this story of a love affair which, for all its emotional high heat, catches sympathy and has a good bit more of psychological reason and unreason than most. It is the story of Sara, 31, twice widowed and a writer, living on one of England' colonial outposts, who meets Murray, an Englishman, who stops off there. Generous, impulsive, his formality and unassailability intrigue her, and they have an affair, overnight. She realizes, however, that his idolatry of his son dominates his every move, making him a despot. Refusing to give her a child of her own, he eventually leaves her and returns to England. She follows a few months later, to find that his son has been invalided for life, destroying all the hopes he had built up around him, and that he is now eager to comply with her wishes. But -- the wiser of the two -- she sends him away. A woman's book, primarily.