Press Coverage Winter 2004

In the Spectator Charlotte Moore reviewed Marghanita Laski’s The Village, ‘one of those lovely Persephone reprints with a pearly grey cover and endpapers like the maids’ bedroom curtains in a Victorian country house... This traditionally organised novel of English village life is more than a gentle dig at quirky English behaviour. It’s a precise, evocative but unsentimental account of a period of transition, an absorbing novel and a useful piece of social history.’

'Most first-hand accounts by those who fought apartheid tend to be detailed, historical and not overly personalised,’ wrote Peter Hain in the Guardian, in a long review of The World that was Ours. ‘Hilda Bernstein’s is not. It is a very personal and gripping story which shares her emotions with the reader – she tells how it all happened and how it feels when it happens to you. That is why it is so readable, so fascinating and so important an account of one of the truly heroic struggles to end in completel victory.’

‘On holiday,’ wrote Sarah Crompton in the DailyTelegraph, ‘I read The World that was Ours, an engrossing and moving account of South Africa’s Rivonia Trial. I also read Someone at a Distance, written in 1953 by Dorothy Whipple, which describes the destruction of a happy home by an affair with such detail and psychological insight that it makes many modern novels look conventional and superficial.’

The Times paperback reviewer Chris Power noted that ‘Duff Cooper, a former Secretary of State for War, never wrote another novel, which, given Operation Heartbreak’s understatedly affecting quality and satisfying conclusion, is a great shame.’

In the Jewish Chronicle Anne Sebba reviewed the ‘deeply moving’ The World that was Ours: ‘In this riveting book Hilda Bernstein vividly recreates the atmosphere of post war South Africa and her own part in the struggle to bring about equality and justice… Most accounts of major political events are written by the men who were driving them. Here is an intensely female view.’

Good Food on the Aga was published in 1933,’ said This England, ‘and has since been regarded as a classic cookery book; but the recipes can  be cooked on any stove, not just an Aga.’

Image magazine’s Anna Carey commented: ‘As ever, autumn brings two new delectable offerings from the always reliable Persephone Books, The Village, a delightful comedy of manners, and the touching Operation Heartbreak.’

Collleen Mondor wrote on bookslut.com: ‘I recently read The Wise Virgins by Leonard Woolf, ordering it primarily (I am chagrined to say) because I had never heard of this novel by Virginia Woolf’s husband. The Wise Virgins was an unfortunate casualty of both WW1 and Virginia’s more overwhelming literary success, but it has found a happy home with Persephone. By the end of Woolf's book I was shocked, stunned in fact, by the turn of events and yet I realise in retrospect that I should have expected it all along. I have just grown so unaccustomed to this style of writing, to the type of books where very quiet things happen in very dramatic ways to perfectly normal people without anyone thinking twice about it.  Woolf reminded me yet again why I love this publisher so much. At Persephone they know that drama is found most often in the little moments every day, you just have to sit still and read long enough to notice it.’