Press Coverage
Spring 2010

‘As a fan of Noel Streatfeild’s children’s books, I came to Saplings– one of her fifteen novels for adults – with great interest. The novel starts with the Wiltshires enjoying a family holiday on the beach and soon we start to become familiar with each child, and understand a little about their parents, Alex and Lena. As the novel unfolds, their comfortable family life begins to unravel with the onset of the Second World War. Children have to be evacuated, schools changed, grief endured and new relationships formed. Lena struggles to cope with her changing role, and with the absence of her husband her own flaws are exposed. The idyllic and secure seaside holidays seem incredibly distant, almost dreamlike. Essentially this novel is about the disintegration of a middle­class family during the war. Streatfeild keeps you hooked with her aptitude for close, and often witty, observation of children, and her warmth for them shines through. I hope the wonderful Persephone Books will consider reprinting more of her novels.’ Emma Milne-White The Bookseller

‘This was a year full of good things. Two first-rate literary biographies, Blake Bailey’s amazing, scandalous and hilarious life of John Cheever and one that I’ve been waiting decades for, Nicola Beauman’s The Other Elizabeth Taylor. This was a labour of love, angrily disowned and rejected, alas, by Elizabeth Taylor’s children on the basis of some upsetting personal revelations. (They should read Bailey’s Cheever and count themselves lucky.)’ Philip Hensher Spectator Christmas Books

Mrs Rundell was the Nigella of her day – a domestic goddess whose book sold thousands in Regency England. This Persephone edition of A New System of Domestic Cookery is a great chance to discover what mattered in the kitchen in 1806. Many of the recipes still appeal  – “shrimp pie, excellent”, apple jelly, quaking pudding, pound cake. Even more fascinating are the oddities such as jellied pigeons and artificial ass’s milk (good for invalids, apparently), showing how much has changed in British kitchens in the last two hundred years.’ Bee Wilson The Daily Telegraph

‘To Bed with Grand Music is… a corrosively authentic and daring novel about the goings on of a silly young wife in wartime London. In it we are very far from the sagas of rationing, chicken-keeping and evacuees that have earlier figured in Persephone’s list, and even further from lachrymose tales of wronged womanhood. Deborah, whose amiable husband is stationed in the Middle East, gets bored looking after her small child in a wartime country village and when the temptation of a job in London is dangled in front of her she takes it. Her naivety initially leads her to be angry because the first man she falls into bed with won’t pretend to be in love with her. But the first Yank leads to another one, and then to the next lover and the next, the transient nature of most wartime London postings forming a toxic mixture with Deborah’s own greed and lack of character. Soon she is living in a heady world far beyond her means, not only financially but also in terms of her own fragile sense of reality. Leaving much food for thought… much of this utterly convincing book makes for hilarious reading…’ Gillian Tindall in the Literary Review

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