Household Sounds

• The Old Jest by Jennifer Johnston
  Hamish Hamilton, 167 pp, £4.95, ISBN 0 00 000097 3
• The Goosefeather Bed by Diana Melly
  Duckworth, 139 pp, £5.95, ISBN 0 00 000097 3
• The Snow Man by Valerie Kershaw
  Duckworth, 159 pp, £5.95, ISBN 0 00 000097 3
• Spring Sonata by Bernice Rubens
  W.H. Allen, 215 pp, £4.94, ISBN 0 00 000097 3

The Old Jest is set in a village on the Irish coast, not far from Dublin, in the summer of 1920. Nancy Gulliver, the heroine, an orphan just turned 18, lives in a fine old house with her Aunt Mary and a senile, hymn-singing grandfather. In this holiday between school and university she strikes up a relationship with a middle-aged Republican gunman hiding out in a hut on the shore. The action of the novel is concerned with this relationship and what it leads to.