Issue 9 - Spring 2001

Open Book: Book of the Year

Charlie Lee-Potter of Radio 4 chose, as one of her two books of the year, Elizabeth Berridge's Tell It to a Stranger. 'The stories are sharp and they're sparse. . . the book is very much of its time, it does just tell you everything you need to know about life in the 1940s.'

Her guest, Suzy Feay of the Independent, agreed: 'She's very very concentrated, very very crisp, she just comes out and declarative sentences pile on top of declarative sentences and some of her sentences could just be a short story in themselves, I mean she will just write one line about somebody and it's so perfect.'

Charlie Lee-Potter continued, 'I think we should give some credit too to the publishers of this book ­ and one doesn't normally want to do that'; what Persephone does 'is bring back to the reader stories that have long gone, sort of fallen between the cracks in the floorboards and produced them in these beautiful editions.'

She then asked the writer Ian Sinclair whether he admired them. 'Yes,' he replied, 'it's very attractive to me to have a book that is properly treated as an object, that it's a joy to handle, and I love this whole business of diving back into the past to dig up writers who slipped through the cracks. . . this seems to me an excellent series in that they all have a particular identity.'