Search Worlds Without End

"it was on the 13th May, 1952, that the abyss, which was to engulf so great a part of our generation, first began to open under our feet."

A few pages further on we learn that Russia has been wiped out by the air fleets of Germany and Japan.

It is indeed a terrible warning of what war must mean that is given in this novel by Joseph O'Neill, one of whose other novels, Wind fro the North, has just been awarded the Harmsworth Prize fo the Council of the Irish Academy of Letters for the best work of imaginative prose of its year.

Anthony Julian travels to a subterranean world in search of his father, only to discover the elder Julian has been transformed by the mind control techniques of that world's rulers. A dystopian lost world novel with an anti-fascist subtext.

Here is a novel with a totally fresh setting and a very original approach. It is often forgotten that Dublin, in the early Middle Ages, was a Norse town. And those were stirring times. Be a strange accident a modern man find himself thrown back into the midst of the eleventh-century town. Half-accepted, half-suspected, he lives for four months in the midst of fierce rushing life of the people. sharing their loves and hates, their hopes and fears.

No such picture of ancient Norse life has ever been given outside of the great novels of Sigrid Undset. Here is nothing of the mere saga, nothing of the merely historical, but a life lived with an intensity and vividness that make the life of today pale by comparison. A story of adventure undoubtedly, sind the tale races from cover to cover but the dominating adventures are in it are the dark adventures of a man's soul, the shock of opposing creeds, the profound despair of one who has found no solutions to the eternal question. The wash and moan of the sea are the enveloping music of the book and behind it are the was and moan of the greater sea that envelops all men's lives.