Persephone Books Ltd: 16 books

This collection celebrates the diversity and range of Persephone writers, by gathering together a varied collection of stories in one large 450-page volume. A reader commented that ‘they often focus on the small, quiet or unspoken intricacies of human relationships rather than grand dramas’. The...

Miss Pettigrew is about a governess sent by an employment agency to the wrong address, where she encounters a glamorous night-club singer, Miss LaFosse. 'The sheer fun, the light-heartedness' in this wonderful 1938 book 'feels closer to a Fred Astaire film than anything else' comments the Preface-writer...

This, the fourth Dorothy Whipple novel Persephone has republished, is, like the others, apparently gentle but has a very strong theme, in this case domestic violence. Three sisters marry very different men and the choices they make determine whether they will flourish, be tamed or be repressed. Lucy's...

The World that was Ours is about the events leading up to the 1964 Rivonia Trial when Hilda Bernstein's husband was acquitted but Mandela and the 'men of Rivonia' received life sentences. 'This passionately political memoir,' observed The Times, 'is vibrant with the dilemmas of everyday family life,...

Exploring most aspects of English domestic life during the war, they are about separation, sewing parties, fear, evacuees sent to the country, obsession with food, the social revolutions of wartime. In the Daily Mail Angela Huth called Good Evening, Mrs Craven ‘my especial find’ and Ruth Gorb in...

This 1946 novel is about a woman who goes on a cruise and is swept overboard; she lives for three years on a desert island before being rescued by a destroyer in 1943. When she returns to England it seems to her to have gone mad: she cannot buy clothes without 'coupons', her friends are only interested in 'war work', and yet she is considered uncivilised if she walks barefoot or is late for meals.

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...

Monica Dickenss first book, published in 1940, could easily have been called Mariana an Englishwoman. For that is what it is: the story of a young English girls growth towards maturity in the 1930s. We see Mary at school in Kensington and on holiday in Somerset; her attempt at drama school; her year...

The Shuttle, a 1907 page-turner about American heiresses marrying English aristocrats, explores the effect of American energy, dynamism and affluence on an effete and impoverished English ruling class; and the process by which a great English country house can be brought back to life with the injection...

In Miss Buncles Book Barbara Buncle, who is unmarried and perhaps in her late thirties, lives in a small village and writes a novel about the village in order to try and supplement her meagre income. She thereby succeeds in taking charge of her own life. This is an entirely light-hearted, easy read,...

A very good novel indeed about the fragility and also the tenacity of love commented the Spectator recently about Someone at a Distance, the 1953 novel by Dorothy Whipple, which was ignored fifty years ago because editors are going mad for action and passion (as she was told by her publisher). But this...

When I picked up Little Boy Lost I offered it the tenderly indulgent regard I would any period piece, wrote Nicholas Lezard in the Guardian. As it turned out, the book survives perfectly well on its own merits although it nearly finished me. If you like a novel that expertly puts you through the wringer,...

In The Blank Wall (1947) a suburban matron, harassed by wartime domestic problems her husband is overseas finds herself implicated in the murder of her young daughters extremely unattractive beau (The New Yorker). An outstanding example of the psychological thriller genre, worthy of the great Patricia...

A never-before-translated collection by the bestselling author of Suite Française. Written between 1934 and 1942, these ten gem-like stories mine the same terrain of Némirovsky's bestselling novel Suite Française: a keen eye for the details of social class; the tensions between mothers and daughters,...