The White Dove

In the calm between two world wars, Amy Lovell searches for a pathway out of the gracious drawing rooms of the English upper class. She needs more purpose to her life than the glittering social whirl her soigne mother enjoys, and the seamier, but no less costly pastimes of her amusing brother, Richard. Above all, Amy has no wish to share the fate of her sister, Isabelle, married to a Conservative politician whose abuse drives his gentle wife mad. On a lark, Amy attends a meeting of communist sympathizers, through whom she meets Nick Penry, a grim-faced union organizer from a Welsh mining town. With his anger as her goad, she decides to train as a nurse at the Royal Lambeth Hospital, an institution full of starch, but lacking in heart. The ties that bind Nick to his wife and child are nearly dissolved by his love affair with Amy, but even she can't separate him from politics, and Nick enlists to fight against the Fascists in the Spanish Civil War. From her vantage point nursing the wounded, Amy shares his horror over a conflict that will irrevocably change them both. Thoroughly engaging characters distinguish this warm, vivid portrait of an era by the author of Sunrise. 50,000 first printing; first serial to Cosmopolitan; Literary Guild Dual main selection. (June 10)