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Manners & Morals. All in all, the best novels of the year came from Britain. George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four was a grim warning of what the latter stages of statism could be like. A Book-of-the-Month Club choice and a bestseller, it was a happy combination of urgent theme and ideal writer that found adequate recognition. The Literary Guild also reached abroad, in a departure from its routine menu, to give its 900,000 members Elizabeth Bowen's The Heat of the Day. Long considered one of the world's fine stylists, Miss Bowen was at her best in this study of tenuous human relationships in wartime Britain. To Be a Pilgrim, Joyce Gary's fourth novel to be published in the U.S., was a knowing, good-humored look at 20th Century British manners & morals seen through the eyes of an old Victorian individualist. England's shyest novelist and one of her best, Henry Green, made his American bow with Loving. A dense, subtly written and poetic novel of character with an Irish-castle setting, it fully deserved the British critical puffs that preceded it. The most overrated British novel of the year was Hope Muntz's care fully researched but woodenly written The Golden Warrior, the story of luckless King Harold and the Norman Conquest. The parade of Italian novels continued throughout the year, most of them reflecting the bitterness and weariness of Italian life. Much-touted Alberto Moravia's The Woman of Rome was a sexy, glibly written story about a young prostitute that lacked entirely the large significance claimed for it. Stronger and better stuff was Elio Vittorini's In Sicily, a sad, smoldering look at Italian poverty and hopelessness under Mussolini. It came with a blessing from Ernest Hemingway, who had postponed his own long-awaited postwar novel to whip out a short one promised for the summer of 1950 under the marathon title, Across the River and into the Trees.