Persephone Books discussion

I'll be posting a poll for our Oct/Nov books in a few days, but I just wanted to give everyone a chance to submit suggestions. Please send me a message if there are certain books you'd like me to include in the poll. Thanks!

How about Hostages to Fortune by Elizabeth Cambridge? I've heard great things about it.

Sure, thanks for the suggestion, Karen!

A London Child of the 1870s would be interesting to discuss....

All right, I've posted the Oct/Nov poll! Here's a summary of the books, from the Persephone website:
Miss Ranskill Comes Home - This 1946 novel (by the author of the Worzel Gummidge books) 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 focus of Barbara Euphan Todd's satire is people behaving heroically and appallingly at one and the same time. Rosamond Lehmann considered Miss Ranskill Comes Home 'a work of great originality, and delightfully readable, a blend of fantasy, satire and romantic comedy... a very entertaining novel and less light than it seems.'

A London Child of the 1870s - 'We were just an ordinary, suburban, Victorian family, undistinguished ourselves and unacquainted with distinguished people.' Thus Molly Hughes in one of the great classics of autobiography, A London Child of the 1870s (1934) in which she describes her everyday life in a semidetached house in Islington as the youngest of a large, characterful family. On first reading, writes Adam Gopnik of The New Yorker, A London Child seemed 'the most perfect and moving record of ordinary life in English' and when he re-read it twenty years later 'Molly's book seems to me more painful now than it did when I first read it, but still finer as writing. Here is an ordinary life rendered truly, and joyfully, with a voice at once so self-abnegating yet so gay and funny and precise that we are reminded, in the end, of the one truth worth remembering, that there are no ordinary lives.' As Adam Gopnik says, it is Molly's pictures of everyday life that most stick in the mind: traveling by bus to the West End, making toffee in the afternoon, walking to St Paul's on Christmas Day...

The Village - 'If anyone asked me to describe life in post-war Britain, ' commented Sarah Crompton in the Daily Telegraph, 'I would suggest they read The Village, a 1952 story of lovers divided by class that tells you more about the subtle gradations of life in the Home Counties and the cataclysmic changes wrought by war and a Labour government than any number of plays by JB Priestley or more famous tomes by Greene and Waugh. ' And Charlotte Moore wrote in the Spectator: 'This traditionally organised novel of English village life is more than a gentle dig at quirky English behaviour. It is a precise, evocative but unsentimental account of a period of transition; it's an absorbing novel, and a useful piece of social history.'

Hostages to Fortune - This autobiographical first novel follows the life of a young woman from 1915 when she has her first baby until early 1933 when it was published. Catherine's husband, invalided out of the army in 1917, buys a doctor's practice in an Oxfordshire village and here the young couple bring up their three children and are deeply involved in the life of the village. It is a surprisingly hard life, full of difficulties and disillusions, but a satisfying one nevertheless. Hostages to Fortune is a brave and unusual novel in its description of both the realities of parenthood and its attendant disappointments - there is no plot as such, and yet the reader becomes absorbed in a life which is in one sense faraway and in another, because this is a domestic novel par excellence, not very different from many such lives today.

We'll see how the voting goes - we may go for the top 3 books if the votes are close, and then you can get a free book from Persephone! Some of you may have received this email today, but I wanted to pass it on to those who haven't-

Summer Reading Offer
Dear Persephone Reader,
‘This funny, intelligent, deceptively low-key collection is long overdue’ wrote the Guardian last Saturday about the new audiobook version of our short story collection Good Evening, Mrs Craven read by Lucy Scott.
So we thought we would give a boost to some of our other short story collections that do not get so much attention.
If you buy three Persephone books as normal we will send you, completely free of charge, a copy of one of the following collections: Tell It to a Stranger (No. 15), The Montana Stories (No. 25), Minnie’s Room (No. 34), Tea with Mr Rochester (No. 44), The Casino (No. 48), The Woman Novelist and Other Stories (No. 64) or The Closed Door and Other Stories (No. 74).
Just write in the Additional Information box (below Shipping Information) which book you would like. Please note: this offer is valid from July 7th-31st and can only be used once.
Some people are unaccountably reluctant to read short stories. This is their chance to overcome that reluctance for ever!

Thanks, Gina!

Great choices! I loved both The Village and A London Child, and I have Miss Ranskill and Hostages to Fortune on the TBR shelf. No matter what, I'll be happy.

Thanks, Gina, I'm very happy with these choices, too! I loved 'A London Child' and the other books are on my TBR list.