STEPHANIA (375 pp.)llona KarmelHoughton Mifflin ($3.75).
So far, the 1953 book season has produced no brilliant major novels, but it has already introduced some highly promising first novelists, e.g., 27-year-old George Lanning, author of The Happy Rural Seat, and 31-year-old Jefferson Young, who wrote A Good Man (see Recent & Readable). Now comes a 27-year-old Polish girl named llona Karmel with a quietly gripping story called Stephania.
llona Karmel spent her late teens in Nazi concentration camps, and when V-E came, her body was wasted and broken. Her spirit, as events proved, was intact....