BY J.M.  SYNGE.

THE ARAN ISLANDS.

By J.M.  SYNGE.  Large Paper Edition, with Twelve Drawings by JACK B. YEATS, coloured by hand.  Cr. 4to.  Hand-made paper, limited to 150 copies. 21s. net.  Ordinary Edition, Demy 8vo., antique paper (with the Drawings in Black and White), 5s. net.

This book records the experience of several lengthy visits paid by the author to Inishmaan and Aranmor, the chief islands of the Aran group.  He gives an intimate account of the general manner of life on these islands, so isolated from civilisation, where the life is in some ways the most primitive that is left in Western Europe.

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     Worth any hundred ordinary travel books.  It is full of strange
     suggestions to the eye and to the imagination.  It is
     continuously interesting.—­R.  Lynd (Sunday Sun).

No reader can put the book down without the feeling that he, too, has actually been present upon those lonely Atlantic rocks, cried over by the gulls, among the passionate, strange people whose ways are described here, with so tender a charity.—­Daily News.

Nothing written by the author of “The Playboy of the Western World” can be uninteresting or unimportant ...  A fine achievement, and only a sympathetically gifted man would and could have done it.—­The Times.

     A charming book.—­W.L.  Courtney (Daily Telegraph).

     American Press Opinions of Mr. Synge’s Work.

“Mr. Synge’s plays are the biggest contribution to Literature made by any Irishman in out time....  If there is any man living and writing for the stage with youth on his side and the future before him, it is John Synge, whose four plays.... represent accomplishment of the highest order.  It is true that these dramas do deal only with peasants, but they are handled in the universal way that Ibsen used when he made the bourgeois of slow Norwegian towns representative of the human race everywhere.... it is not only in the avoidance of joyless and pallid words that Mr. Synge has chosen the better part.  He has experienced the rich joy found only in what is superb and wild in reality; and so it was just because ’The Playboy’ was so true in its presentation of the weaknesses—­if weaknesses they can be called—­as well as the strength of his men and women, that a furore was raised against it as a sort of satire....  The sympathy of the dramatist with his people makes itself felt in spite of his ability to stand apart detachment from them.”—­New York “Evening Sun."

“’The Aran Islands’.... of vast importance as throwing a light on this curious development.... is like no other book we have ever read.  This is not because the people described in it are unique.  With the most artful simplicity Mr. Synge gives you first a