The Far Cry was the first book on MacGibbon & Kee's newly-launched list. This 'savage comedy with a vicious streak' (Elizabeth Bowen in the Tatler in 1949) describes the 'second passage to India' of 'Teresa, whose elderly, wilful father drags her off to spare her from the clutches of her mother…I can think of no writer, British or Indian, who has captured so vividly, with such intensity, the many intangibles of the Indian kaleidoscope; Emma Smith harnessed those intense impressions of her youth to give her story a quite extraordinary driving force' wrote Charles Allen in the Spectator, going on to agree with Susan Hill in her Afterword that the book is 'a small masterpiece…beautifully shaped, evocative, moving and mature.'