Books: No Cause For Alarm

ORDEAL—Nevil Shute—Morrow ($2.50).

At dawn Peter Corbett, junior partner of Johnson, Bellinger & Corbett, rose drunkenly from the clammy garage floor. He was wet, grease-smeared, his head ached and he was sick at his stomach. His wife and baby lay huddled asleep in the back seat of the Austin. In a junior bed, flanked by the garden roller and a sandbox, slept Phyllis, 6, John 3. The nurse lay rolled up in an eiderdown beside the car.

Such, for this typical middle-class English family, was the morning after the air raid. The town was Southampton,...