Reno, Nevada is the setting for a first novel which is a convincing example of its kind: The Desert of the Heart develops a moral situation until a decision is made which the reader feels has been fairly and interestingly worked for. Evelyn Hall, university teacher, unsuccessfully married for 16 years, has come for her divorce. She falls in love with a young girl who works in a casino. Gradually she realises her marriage has been a 'long detour' from her original nature. The conflict between what she knows to be natural and what she believes to be right is worked out on the equivocal stages of the Nevada desert and the gambling-club…. The setting is brilliantly used throughout: one of the central episodes, on a barren lake-shore bone-white with fossil snail-shells, recalls Passage to India. The pessimistic message of the caves ('Everything exists, nothing has value') seems here...