Letter

     We hope that if you are reading this Fortnightly Letter you received our email about Someone at a Distance being on Book at Bedtime – here is the link if you missed it or want to listen again. (If you are not on our email list please let us know; but do not expect endless emails as we only send them out about half a dozen times a year.) Dorothy Whipple was mentioned in a review in the Guardian of a new history of the publishing firm John Murray: ‘The Murray list now included Axel Munthe, Conan Doyle, Françoise Sagan and the furiously prolific Dorothy Whipple, who was responsible for single-handedly using up most of the firm’s wartime paper ration.’  She was not, of course, furiously prolific (alas) but it is true that her two wartime novels, The Priory (1939) and They Were Sisters (1943) are very long.

   Time Out mentioned our audiobook of Miss Pettigrew. The reviewer said that the book ‘may not be a literary classic, but only the harshest of readers could fail to be charmed by the delightful heroine… Chronicled to the minute over a 24-hour time span, it is impossible to switch off – I had painted an entire bedroom by the end. It is intelligently read by Frances McDormand, who also stars in the film. Rumour has it she loved the book so much she insisted on recording it. [This is true.]  Exquisitely packaged, as ever, by tiny London publisher Persephone, Miss Pettigrew is a treasure.’

  In this month’s Elle Decoration we are the chosen bookshop in the category ‘Best for Enchanting Fiction Ideal as Gifts’: the ‘Hot Buy’ is The Crowded Street.  Yarnstorm writes, as eloquently as ever, about three of our books this week.  And do look at this excellent new blog, Ancient Industries.

   I have just discovered Time Out’s 1000 Books to Change Your Life with its piece by Juliet Gardiner on ‘Women in War’. She writes about Saplings, ‘an unsettling book about wartime disruption and disintegration seen from the perspective of four children’ and Mollie Panter-Downes’s Good Evening, Mrs Craven, ‘a marvellously bittersweet compilation’; and also about Naomi Mitchison, Frances Partridge, Between the Acts, Few Eggs and No Oranges, Nella Last’s War, Joan Wyndham, Margery Allingham, Jan Struther, EM Delafield, Betty Miller and Consider the Years by Virginia Graham, ‘an authentic historian of her age’. And Juliet Gardiner mentions Sarah Russell/ Marghanita Laski’s To Bed with Grand Music which we hope to reprint, with an introduction by Juliet, in October 2009, when there will be a spate of books marking seventy years since the outbreak of the Second World War.

Nicola Beauman
59 Lamb’s Conduit Street
15 September 2008