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Persephone Books

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Persephone Books

Publisher of neglected fiction and nonfiction by mid-twentieth century (mostly) women writers, all in elegant grey matching editions. Also a bookshop.
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02/10/2026

PB no. 154 THE PRISONER by Sally Carson, who is pictured here, is reviewed in the latest issue of the T.L.S..

“THE PRISONER has stood up well to the passage of time. Its chilling picture of Germany under Hi**er and its prescient warning about what was to come are both fascinating in themselves and uncomfortable reminders of the ease with which authoritarianism can take hold….

Many British and other European travellers – Christopher Isherwood and Virginia Woolf among them – were writing about N**i German in the 1930s. But few did so in fiction with the urgency and the perceptiveness of Carson…

It is her clarity about the N**is’ fanaticism and seriousness, repeatedly observed and documented, of course, by many horrified Germans, that make CROOKED CROSS and THE PRISONER stand out. Carson writes almost as if she were reporting, which increases the sense of menace, and she brilliantly captures the speed at which formerly decent people can be seduced and corrupted. Reading her trilogy again, it is impossible not to wonder why the world did not pay her more heed.”

PB no. 154 THE PRISONER by Sally Carson, which is the sequel to PB no. 152 CROOKED CROSS, is available now. The third in Carson’s trilogy, PB no. 156 A TRAVELLER CAME BY, will be published by Persephone Books in April.

https://persephonebooks.co.uk/products/the-prisoner

01/10/2026

A glimpse of the Persephone Books office one Wednesday afternoon in September at around 3 o’clock.

In the background are shelves of books about textiles that we use to choose our endpapers, as well as some translated editions of our titles. The Bentwood hat stand with the vintage dress strewn atop was heroically dropped off by a kind Persephone reader this morning ready to be displayed in our shop window to celebrate our forthcoming autumn title, PB no. 154 HER SON’S WIFE by Dorothy Canfield.

And the grey cardigan hung on the back of the chair? That’s because there is almost always a chill in the air at the back of our 1761 Georgian building, even in the very warmest months.

26/09/2026

“Horace wondered how they would ever eat their way through the shelves and shelves of his wife’s misery.”

A Persephone reader quoted this line to us over coffee today and we haven’t stopped thinking about it since.

It comes from the 1953 short story ‘Their Walk of Life’ in PB no. 34 MINNIE’S ROOM: THE PEACETIME STORIES OF MOLLIE PANTER-DOWNES, which is about Horace, a solicitor in an English seaside town, and his wife Christine. They find themselves desperately upset when their only child Rosalie suddenly announces she is planning to marry a local boy named George, whom she first met on the side of the road when her bicycle tyre had punctured. “In the restless energy of her unhappiness, Christine was making jams as other women, also wretched, might buy new clothes, or take a lover, or go off on a long uncomfortable journey.”

PB no. 34 MINNIE’S ROOM contains ten stories written between 1947 and 1965, each of them describing an aspect of life in Britain in the years after World War Two. In every single one Mollie Panter-Downes uses language with an insight and a poetic sensibility that is the mark of a great writer.

The title story ‘Minnie’s Room’ was the first thing the author wrote after finishing ‘One Fine Day’, which is in our view one of the great novels of the twentieth century; it is about a family who are unable to believe that their maid wants to leave them to live in a room of her own. An elderly couple emigrates to South Africa because of “the dragon out to gobble their modest, honourable incomes.” The brothers and sisters in ‘Beside the Still Waters’ grumble because: “Everything is so terribly difficult nowadays. [We] seem to be slaving... trying to keep the place going.”

These “acute, funny and poignant stories” (Daily Telegraph) reveal “an unerring observer, with a stunning gift for economy of description” (The Times). Indeed.

To purchase PB no. 34 MINNIE’S ROOM: THE PEACETIME STORIES OF MOLLIE PANTER-DOWNES for £15 plus shipping, click on https://persephonebooks.co.uk/products/minnies-room-the-peacetime-stories-of-mollie-panter-downes.

24/09/2026

“Alice’s waters have broken”, shouted a man as he ran into the Persephone bookshop, looking frantic. “Where’s the 60 quid?” We were baffled. Who’s Alice? And why 60 quid? After a bit of back and forth it turned out he had the wrong address – but what was he hoping to find at the right address? We spent the rest of the day trying to fill in the gaps in this little drama playing out at Edgar Buildings. Meanwhile, we have been overwhelmed in the most delightful way by the hundreds of responses to our Top Ten Favourite Novels survey. Thank you so much to everyone who has already entered; it runs until the end of October though so there’s still plenty of time to send us yours. A customer came into the bookshop asking what to buy if he loves ‘Brideshead Revisited’; he left with PB no. 38 CHEERFUL WEATHER FOR THE WEDDING, PB no. 126 DESPISED AND REJECTED and PB no. 40 THE PRIORY, though we wondered about PB no. 112 VAIN SHADOW as well. Another customer wanted a book that features Venice, which unfortunately drew a blank but instead we offered PB no. 82 AMOURS DE VOYAGE which takes place in Rome or PB no. 120 MADAME SOLARIO set on the shores of Lake Como. Meanwhile a long article in this week’s New Yorker magazine about godwits reminded us in a left-field way that we must remember to shout more loudly about PB no. 117 THE GODWITS FLY, a semi-autobiographical very poetic 1939 novel about a girl’s fraught childhood in New Zealand and then her early days as a writer. And the nation’s passion for PB no. 67 THE FORTNIGHT IN SEPTEMBER continues unabated, causing us to worry about whether to rush a reprint and if so how many copies. We also discussed the Booker longlist, ‘Gaining Ground’ by Joan Barford, the sequel to the Cazalet Chronicles, ‘David Copperfield’, ’The Transit of Venus’ by Shirley Hazzard, and more. Mostly though we just wondered what happened to Alice and whether she’s ok and is it her first baby because then the chances are she’ll be in labour for ages anyway. Good luck Alice, whoever you are.

17/09/2026

PB no. 46 MISS RANSKILL COMES HOME by Barbara Euphan Todd was the topic of discussion at the Persephone book group this morning, accompanied by coffee and cake (pictured above). Some found it charming, funny and thought-provoking, others found it irritating and too close to fantasy. Themes we talked about included the plight of single women in this period with nowhere to live and no clear way of earning a living, the parallels with the Covid lockdowns when society changed so quickly overnight, and whether it matters if a novel is believable / true-to-life or not.

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.

The writer 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.’ Lehmann was not alone in her admiration: the Manchester Guardian called it ‘a witty first novel which besides being continuously entertaining displays a fine appreciation of life’s values’, whilst the New York Times praised the blend of ‘reality and fantasy, irony and pity… touchingly persuasive and real’. Meanwhile the Saturday Evening Post described it as ‘one of the finest stories we have read in a long time’.

To purchase MISS RANSKILL COMES HOME for £15 plus shipping, tap on the picture above or head to the Persephone Books website.

16/09/2026

Recent social media posts about PB no. 67 THE FORTNIGHT IN SEPTEMBER by RC Sherriff led to scores of people commenting that it was their favourite book of all time.

Inspired by this, we are asking you, Persephone readers, to write and tell us your Top Ten Favourite Novels: not the ones you think deserve a place in literary history or did at school, but instead the ones you really and truly love, and re-read, and clutch to your bosom, and lend to your friends.

In some ways this is also a response to a similar exercise by the The Guardian newspaper earlier this year that had interesting but provocative results.

Please send us a list of your ten favourite novels, in no particular order, before the end of October and we will then count up the entries and announce the results. You can leave a comment, message or email us, write a letter - whatever suits.

Here are ours for starters: ‘Howards End’, ‘A Game of Hide and Seek’, PB no. 3 SOMEONE AT A DISTANCE, ‘Anna Karenina’, PB no. 141 THE DEEPENING STREAM, ‘The Tortoise and the Hare’, ‘A Passage to India’, ‘Middlemarch’, ‘Ethel and Ernest’ and ‘One Fine Day’.

What are your top ten favourite novels?

11/09/2026

At the end of the Stevens’ garden in Dulwich in PB no. 67 THE FORTNIGHT IN SEPTEMBER is the ‘Railway Embankment’, so when they set off on holiday they catch a fleeting glimpse of their own home, and the “panorama” of neighbours’ gardens which they rarely see. This reversal of view-point makes train journeys fascinating, in the same way the paintings of .scottmiller (b1959) are; this is her ‘Back gardens in autumn, Islington’ (2016).

This concludes our week of posts inspired by PB no. 67 THE FORTNIGHT IN SEPTEMBER.

To purchase the book, head to https://persephonebooks.co.uk/products/the-fortnight-in-september.

For more parallels in pictures to the world of Persephone Books, subscribe to our daily Persephone Post at https://persephonebooks.co.uk/blogs/the-persephone-post.

10/09/2026

RC Sherriff gives a meticulous account in PB no. 67 THE FORTNIGHT IN SEPTEMBER of the Stevens’ journey by train to Bognor, from the anxiety about timing and perhaps missing the connection at busy Clapham Junction, to the choice of compartment, fellow passengers, reading material, and boiled-beef sandwiches. Ten-year-old Ernie Stevens revels in it all: “If Railway Stations had lost their thrill for others, their tantalising mysteries still held him tightly in their grip”.

Pictured here is ‘The Station’ (1930, Museum of the Home) by Lilian Gladys Tickell (1896-1976).

This continues our week of posts about PB no. 67 THE FORTNIGHT IN SEPTEMBER by RC Sherriff.

09/09/2026

The Stevens family in PB no. 67 THE FORTNIGHT IN SEPTEMBER could send their luggage ahead (as referenced in the poster pictured here, 1927-43) but instead use a local porter who collects and wheels their suitcases to the station with them. Today, the idea of taking a clothes brush on holiday and wearing, as Mr Stevens does, flannel trousers, a cricket shirt with a tweed Norfolk jacket, and stout brown walking boots to the seaside - but wearing a “tie of course, for the train journey” - seems terribly old-fashioned, but he is delighted with his “splendid, easy clothes”.

This continues our week of posts about PB no. 67 THE FORTNIGHT IN SEPTEMBER by RC Sherriff.

08/09/2026

Just like an annual holiday, re-reading PB no. 67 THE FORTNIGHT IN SEPTEMBER BY RC Sherriff is something to look forward to every year. Using “penny plain words”, as the author himself said, and with nothing “grand or pretentious about it”, he follows the very ordinary Stevens family on their holiday to Bognor Regis. But first, the preparations or “Marching Orders”, which are described in beautiful detail, including Mary’s job of taking the canary to a rather sad elderly neighbour.

Pictured here: ‘The Birdcage’ by Barbara Smith (c. 1945, York Art Gallery).

This continues our week of posts about PB no. 67 THE FORTNIGHT IN SEPTEMBER by RC Sherriff.

Address

8 Edgar Buildings
Bath
BA12EE

Opening Hours

Monday	10am - 6pm
Tuesday	10am - 6pm
Wednesday	10am - 6pm
Thursday	10am - 6pm
Friday	10am - 6pm
Saturday	11am - 5pm

Website

http://www.persephonebooks.co.uk/

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