Books: Start of Surprise

WHEN MY GIRL COMES HOME (240 pp.)—V. S. Prifchetf—Knopf ($4).

"It was the face of someone to whom nothing had happened; or, perhaps, so much had happened to her that each event wiped out what had happened before. I was disturbed by something in her—the lack of history, I think." It is the lack of history—suffered by the heroine of this book's title story—that must disturb any reader of Critic-Novelist V. S. Pritchett's haunting tales. The characters who move through these pages have arrived from places the reader has never visited and by routes...