Books: The Editors Like

People of the Reeds BY GAVIN MAXWELL

Mr. Maxwell visited a remote group of swamp-dwelling Arabs out of plain curiosity, and his account of these people is astonishing, funny, unpretentious, and irresistible. HARPER, $4.50.

The Ashanti BY ROBERT A. LYSTAD

The Ashanti live in the new country of Ghana, where Dr. Lystad, an anthropologist, studied them with an interest which no reader intrigued by Africa can fail to share, RUTGERS UNIVERSITY PRESS, $5.00.

I Was a Savage BY PRINCE MODUPE

Extraordinary memoirs by an African gentleman who jumped from the tribal Bronze Age to the modern world in some ten years. The tale seems almost too good to be true, HARCOURT, BRACE, $3.95.

BY PETER S. FEIBLEMAN

A very good first novel, a welcome variation on the suffering-adolescent theme. The Negro narrator-heroine suffers from solid troubles, and resists with spirit, WORLD, $4.75.

The Sundial BY SHIRLEY JACKSON

Fantasy, allegory, symbolism — the reader can make his own choice concerning Miss Jackson’s amusing and terrifying myth about the end of the world, FARRAR, STRAUS & CUDAHY, $3.75.

A Chinese classic, never translated in full. The present version, translated by Florence and Isabel McHugh from the German version of Dr. Franz Kuhn, is almost complete. It reveals an intricately constructed work of art combining lively realism with a mystical theme. PANTHEON, $7.50.

The Voyage Home BY ERNST SCHNABEL

An odd and quietly amusing book which reworks Homer’s story to show Odysseus as an ironic pirate trying his best to disown his heroic reputation, HARCOURT, BRACE, $3.75.

BY GLENDON SWARTHOUT

Well written and solidly based on character, this novel raises much excitement from Major Thorn’s determination to do his duty in spite of what he considers his hopeless cowardice, RANDOM HOUSE, $3.50.

The Midwich Cuckoos BY JOHN WYNDIIAM

The inventor of the terrible Triffids has concocted another interplanetary invasion, this one starting from a comically scandalous freak and working up to a fine state of jitters, BALLANTINE, $3.50.