Fiction: Recent Books: Jan. 28, 1935

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HORNETS' NEST—Helen Ashton—Macmillan ($2.50). A clever, tightly-constructed story of complications in the lives of three doctors, the staff of a nursing home and the inhabitants of an English provincial town resulting from a swab left in the incision after an appendectomy. Miss Ashton, whose Dr. Serocold treated of 24 hours in the life of a physician, was herself a War nurse, holds a medical degree from the London Hospital. She writes with clean, surgical precision. Her description of the appendectomy has the brutal clarity of a hospital painting by the late Thomas Eakins.

THIS WANDERER —Louis Golding— Farrar & Rinehart ($2.50). Mr. Golding takes a vacation from his heavily-documented novels to tell some modern Arabian Nights tales. Style: easy, effortless, luminous.

NOT WITHOUT THE WEDDING—Theodore Pratt—Dutton ($2). Amateurish comedy of love both with and without benefit of wedlock. Spanish atmosphere does not quite succeed in shedding glamour.

A HISTORY OF THE WORLD WAR—Liddell Hart—Little, Brown ($4). Revised and enlarged rewrite of the author's The Real War, published in 1930.