Although the blurb describes ["The Wind Changes"] as a novel "of a woman and two men in Dublin during the Black and Tan days," Miss Manning draws very little on the external props of the literature of the troubles: tramping patrols, roaring lorries, gunfire and shooting shafts of flashlight. She has other intensities. She seeks her tensions in the problems of the individualist … who would enjoy both the self-completion of the isolationist and also the warm sense of reassurance which comes of being one with the many.

Miss Manning has more artistry than we have any right to expect from the under-thirty author of a first novel…. She can pace thought and feeling, the progression of mental states, with some of the clear cleanness of Hemingway's early dialogue. She has honesty, insight and intelligence. The Englishman's six-hour wait in Belfast for the boat bearing the woman he is in love with is a memorable piece of writing. It is a fine representation of the slow suspension of living in painful waiting….

The weakness of the book lies in its characters. They don't come alive. They are indistinguishable one from the other. Reality and individuality are swamped in the conjugation of their highly inflected feelings. They are not people; they are walking mental states in revolution. They make the book as cold and clammy as their self-centered selfish selves who fall because they think only of themselves.