Lucky Linda

WESTWARD THE SUN (287 pp.)--Geoffrey Cotterell--Lippincott ($3.50).

British readers take to 33-year-old Geoffrey Cotterell's novels as naturally as U.S. movie addicts to popcorn. His five novels have sold a tidy 80,000 copies, and four of them have been British book-club choices. Well buttered with stock situations and salted with everyday speech, the Cotterell brand of popcorn is easy to munch but slim fare as a literary meal. Strait and Narrow, his first novel to be published in the U.S., was about a go-getting young Briton whose law career rose almost as fast as his character dropped. In Westward the Sun, his heroine is a beau-getting, lower-middle-class London girl who ditches her British fiance during World War II to become a Yank's war bride.

Linda Ferrers, a sensible 18-year-old whose only worry is ending up on the matrimonial remnant counter, has nothing to do with noisy American cutups at first. The man she thinks she loves is Syd, a factory hand who goes in for muscle-building as a hobby. A shade monosyllabic when it comes to small talk. Syd is masterful enough as a movie-balcony Romeo. But before Linda will agree to name the day, she sits down with Syd for a serious talk about their future: "Syd. what about yourself? You got .any ambitions?" Replies Syd: "Well. I aim to get 18-inch upper arms. If I do, I might have a go at some of the competitions. See me as Mr. East London, can you? Maybe Mr. Britain, you never know . . . But mind, I'll probably not get beyond 17-and-a-quarter."

Before poor Syd even gets to 17-and-a-quarter, a softspoken, churchgoing G.I. turns up at the Ferrers' home to repair some V-bomb damage, and Mr. Britain-to-be becomes Mr. Also Ran. Since the American boy proves to be the son and heir of a well-heeled Colorado dry-goods merchant, lucky Linda not only flies off to the U.S. at novel's end, but also slips the narrow class bonds that made her content, at novel's start, to read her future in a humble plate of fish & chips.

Told in the first person with a fine ear for shopgirl patter, Westward the Sun (a Book-of-the-Month Club midsummer choice) is clearly aimed at readers with hammocks up and guards down.

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