Norah Hoult during the 1940s

PREFACE BY JULIA BRIGGS
352p PERSEPHONE BOOKS ISBN 1903155495

This 1944 novel is about memory loss and is the only book we know of, apart from Iris about Iris Murdoch (and arguably There Were No Windows is wittier and more profound), on this subject. Based on the last years of the writer Violet Hunt, a once-glamorous woman living in Kensington during the Blitz who is now losing her memory, the novel's three 'acts' describe with insight, humour and compassion what happens to 'Claire Temple' in her last months. 'A quite extraordinary book,' was the verdict of Cressida Connolly in the Spectator, 'unflinchingly, blackly funny, brilliantly observed and terrifying.' And because Claire Temple is an unrepentant snob, 'the novel gives a sly account of the end of an entire way of life.'

'Treetops', a screen printed cotton and rayon furnishing fabric designed by Marianne Mahler in 1939 and produced by Edinburgh Weavers.