Publisher's Synopsis
In beautiful descriptive passages and in profound knowledge of the conflicting passions of the human heart few novels equal "The Challenge to Sinus,"* by Sheila Kaye-Smith. The setting of the story is a little pip of land, the Isle of Oxney, wedged between Sussex and Kent, a separate land rising out of the marsh with ground that becomes good marl, and many farms caught in a "web of little twisting lanes," The novelist has made a careful study of the permanent values gathered from life-experience that offer an eternal challenge to "Sirius, symbol of divine indifference." The "gatherer," Frank Rainger, goes far in search of the deeper satisfactions of life, to London-Thackeray's London -to the battlefields of the Civil War, to a pueblo in a remote forest of Yucatan, and back-at the end-to Maggie, his first sweetheart, and the Isle of Oxney in the Kent Marshes. The episodes of the war are narrated entirely from the Southern point of view at the time of the conflict.
-The American Review of Reviews, Volume 59 [1919
