Books: The Editors Like

AMRITAby R. Prawer Jhabvala. (Norton, $3.50.) Dry, elegant comedy about an Indian couple who try to marry without their families’ consents. Old India, New India, love, Europe, and a few innocent bystanders are gracefully skewered on Mrs. Jhabvala’s rapier.

CAT MANby Edward Hoagland. (Houghton Mifflin, $3.75.) Prize-winning first novel about a circus handyman who prefers his animal charges to his ramshackle human colleagues. Not for the squeamish, but the prose is crisp and nervous, and the descriptions of the big cats are lovely stuff.

KUMARIby William Buchan. (Morrow, $3.50.) A romantic novel about an Englishman’s love affair with India, symbolized by two different women. Mr. Buchan is frankly a follower of Conrad, and although the borrowed style sometimes gets out of hand, it is on the whole effective, sometimes brilliantly so.

THE PROUD MANby Elizabeth Linington . (Viking, $3.95.) The gaudily engaging characters of Irish history have been neglected by historical novelists, and it is a pleasure to find Miss Linington doing well by Shane O’Neill, the Ulster chieftain whose improbable feats included a serious attempt to marry Queen Elizabeth.

MRS. FISKEby Archie Binns. (Crown, $5.00.) A lively biography of one of the great figures of the American stage, a small but indomitable lady whose influence (as innovator, Ibsenite, trust-bueker, and conservationist) was enormous.

NIGHT FELL ON GEORGIAby Charles and Louise Samuels. (Dell, 25¢) Careful reconstruction of a murder and trial that set Atlanta on its ear in 1913. A cause célèbre in its own day, the Frank case still has the power to puzzle and disturb.

THE LAST WILDERNESSby Murray Morgan. (Viking, $3.95.) Stories of the Olympic Peninsula, where trees, fact, and fiction are equally tall. This book is unpretentious and great fun.

LIVING MAMMALS OF THE WORLDby Ivan T. Sanderson. (Hanover House, $9.95.) Even without the many pictures (190 in color) this would be a delightful book, for Mr. Sanderson describes beasts with infectious liking, perpetual wonder, and a nice sense of comedy.

MAMMALS OF THE WORLDby François Bourliere. (Knopf, $12.50.) Another fine animal book, with lovely pictures (fewer in color, but more background in most) and a text which, if not conspicuous stylistically, covers more ground than Mr. Sanderson’s.

TONGAby Patricia Ledyard. (Appleton-CenturyCrofts, $3.75.) Tonga is evidently a real dream of a South Sea island; the author sticks to people, history, and amusing incident and is pleasantly unimpressed by her own proceedings as a schoolteacher.

JUNGLE CHILDby Norah Burke. (Norton, $3.50.) Charming descriptions of a little girl’s adventures in the forests of northern India more than outweigh a few lapses into testy nostalgia for the great days of empire and aristocracy.