Books about Persephone from Amazon.com

Now a major motion picture starring Frances McDormand (Fargo) and Amy Adams (Enchanted)! 

“Why has it taken more than half a century for this wonderful flight of humor to be rediscovered?”—Guardian

“The sweetest grown-up book in the world.”—Sunday Times

“Everyone, no matter how poor or prim or neglected, has a second chance to blossom in the world.”—Daily Mail, in reference to Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day

A major film released in 2008, Miss Pettigrew Lives for Day is a delightful, funny, lighthearted novel. First published in 1938, it was reissued in the United Kingdom in 2000, complete with thirty-five original illustrations, and has sold over 22,000 copies.

Miss Pettigrew, an approaching-middle-age governess, was accustomed to a household of unruly English children. When her employment agency sends her to the wrong address, her life takes an unexpected turn. The alluring nightclub singer, Delysia LaFosse, becomes her new employer, and Miss Pettigrew encounters a kind of glamour that she had only met before at the movies. Over the course of a single day, both women are changed forever.

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Price: $11.18 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Mary Taylor Simeti arrived in Sicily in 1962 to do volunteer work. Freshly graduated from Radcliffe College after growing up in a distinguished and privileged New York City family, the last thing she expected was to fall in love and marry a Sicilian. On Persephone's Island: A Sicilian Journal is the ambivalent love story of an intelligent, complex, and self-reflective woman. The book recounts the events of 1983, the year Simeti turned 42. Her narrative alternates between Palermo, where her children attend school and her husband Toninno is a professor of agricultural economy, and Bosco, in eastern Sicily, where she shoulders demanding responsibilities on the working farm that has belonged to her husband's family for three generations.

Simeti feels the isolation of being an expatriate and outsider, although she claims to welcome this perspective when faced with frustration and disgust at the pervading political corruption and corrosive effects of the Mafia on everyday life. Despite her natural diffidence, she shares personal insights that makeOn Persephone's Island as compelling as her prose. Simeti intersperses rich helpings of Sicilian history and culture with mundane events and insight into what motivates the peasants essential to the survival of the family farm. And she makes pessimistic observations about the complexity of changing times in a society where the persistent reliance on feudal relationships and agriculture is finally crumbling.

An academic manqué, Simeti researches and ruminates on the mythological underpinnings of the many holidays and festivals that punctuate the rhythm of Sicilian life. She focuses particularly on the Greek goddesses Persephone and Demeter, who held Sicily under their protection. She eventually discovers a correlation between her own situation and the story of Persephone, who alternately inhabited the worlds of light and darkness. .
Price: $8.62 [Notify me when price goes down.]

"Boldly published, beautifully designed, dazzlingly written. . . . Profound as Katherine Mansfield, restrained as Jane Austen, sharp as Dorothy Parker."-Felipe Fernández-Armesto, The Independent

For fifty years, Mollie Panter-Downes' name was associated with The New Yorker. She wrote a regular column ("Letter from London"), book reviews, and over thirty short stories about English domestic life during World War Two. Twenty-one of these stories are included in Good Evening Mrs Craven-the first collected volume of her work.

Mollie Panter-Downes writes about those coping on the periphery of the war who attend sewing parties, host evacuees sent to the country, and obsess over food and rationing. She captures the quiet moments of fear and courage. Here we find "the mistress, unlike the wife, who has to worry and mourn in secret for her man" and a "middle-aged spinster finds herself alone again when the camaraderie of the air-raids is over."

"Don't think I'm being stupid and morbid," she said, "but supposing anything happens. . . . You might be wounded or ill and I wouldn't know." She tried to laugh. "The War Office doesn't have a service for sending telegrams to mistresses, does it?"

Mollie Panter-Downes (19061997) published her first novel, The Shoreless Sea, when she was seventeen, which became a bestseller. She wrote three more popular novels as well as articles, short stories, and the very popular column "Letters from London" for The New Yorker.

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Price: $8.64 [Notify me when price goes down.]

"A very good novel indeed about the fragility and also the tenacity of love."-The Spectator

Written in 1953, the last book by best-selling novelist Dorothy Whipple, Someone at a Distance is a quietly gripping story about the destruction of a marriage. Ellen is "that unfashionable creature, a happy housewife" who loves her life in the English countryside. She tends her garden, dotes on her children, and, when she remembers, visits her cantankerous mother-in-law. This domestic bliss, however, is shattered when her husband, in a moment of weak mid-life vanity, runs off with a French girl.

Dorothy Whipple is a superb stylist with a calm intelligence in the tradition of Mrs. Gaskell. In her preface, Nina Bawden states, "it is a great gift to be able to take an ordinary tale and make it compulsive reading. It is all in the telling and Whipple is a storyteller-an art that cannot be taught, cannot be learned, an art only a few writers are lucky enough to be born with. . . . Someone at a Distance is a brilliant account of frailty and folly."

Born in 1893 in Lancashire, England, Dorothy Whipple wrote nine extremely successful novels, two of which were made into films. She also wrote short stories and two memoirs. She died in 1966.

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Price: $8.94 [Notify me when price goes down.]

The storyline of Miss Buncle's Book (1934) is a simple one: Barbara Buncle, who is unmarried and perhaps in her late 30s, lives in a small village and writes a novel about it in order to try and supplement her meagre income. This is a light-hearted, easy read, one of those books like Mariana, Miss Pettigrew, The Making of a Marchioness and Greenery Street which can be recommended unreservedly to anyone looking for something undemanding, fun and absorbing that is also well-written and intelligent. DE Stevenson had an enormously successful writing career: between 1923 and 1970, four million copies of her books were sold in Britain and three million in the States. Like EF Benson, Ann Bridge, O Douglas or Dorothy L Sayers (to name but a few) her books are funny, intensely readable, engaging and dependable. Miss Buncle's Book was the most popular of her novels because it has a completely original plot and a charming and delightful central character..
Price: $17.56 [Notify me when price goes down.]

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year

"Full of insights, marvelously entertaining . . . haunting and beautifully written."
--The New York Review of Books

"I lived in Athens, at the intersection of a prostitute and a saint." So begins Patricia Storace's astonishing memoir of her year in Greece. Mixing affection with detachment, rapture with clarity, this American poet perfectly evokes a country delicately balanced between East and West.

Whether she is interpreting Hellenic dream books, pop songs, and soap operas, describing breathtakingly beautiful beaches and archaic villages, or braving the crush at a saint's tomb, Storace, winner of the Whiting Award, rewards the reader with informed and sensual insights into Greece's soul. She sees how the country's pride in its past coexists with profound doubts about its place in the modern world. She discovers a world in which past and present engage in a passionate dialogue. Stylish, funny, and erudite, Dinner with Persephone is travel writing elevated to a fine art--and the best book of its kind since Henry Miller's The Colossus of Maroussi.

"Splendid. Storace's account of a year in Greece combines past and present, legend and fact, in an unusual and delightful whole. "
--Atlantic Monthly.
Price: $6.34 [Notify me when price goes down.]

A 600 page diary kept from 194-45 in Notting Hill Gate, full of observation and humour. Preface by Jenny Hartley .
Price: $17.56 [Notify me when price goes down.]

"When I picked up this 1949 reprint I offered it the tenderly indulgent regard I would any period piece. As it turned out, the book survives perfectly well on its own merit-although it nearly finished me. If you like a novel that expertly puts you through the wringer, this is the one."-Nicholas Lezard, Guardian

Hilary Wainwright, an English soldier, returns to a blasted and impoverished France during World War Two in order to trace a child lost five years before. But is this small, quiet boy in a grim orphanage really his son? And what if he is not? In this exquisitely crafted novel, we follow Hilary's struggle to love in the midst of a devastating war.

Facing him was a thin little boy in a black sateen overall. Its sleeves were too short and from them dangled red swollen hands too big for the frail wrists. Hilary looked from these painful hands to the little boy's long thin grubby legs, to the crude coarse socks falling over shabby black boots that were surely several sizes too large. It's a foreign child, he thought numbly . . .

Marghanita Laski was born in 1915 to a family of Jewish intellectuals in Manchester; Harold Laski, the socialist thinker, was her uncle. She was the author of six novels and a celebrated critic. She died in 1988.

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Price: $8.83 [Notify me when price goes down.]

This fascinating book discusses the role played by psychoactive mushrooms in the religious rituals of ancient Greece, Eurasia, and Mesoamerica. R. Gordon Wasson, an internationally known ethnomycologist who was one of the first to investigate how these mushrooms were venerated and used by different native peoples, here joins with three other scholars to discuss his discoveries about these fungi, which he has called entheogens, or 'god generated within.'.
Price: $14.98 [Notify me when price goes down.]

"Three cheers to Persephone Books for publishing this witty, sharp writer, nostalgic but unsentimental, humorous but precise, erudite and always elegant."-Country Living

"Kitchen Essays is a rare thing, a cookbook that is as fun to read as its food is to eat."-Sunday Herald (Glasgow)

"[An] exquisitely reprinted period piece."-BBC Good Food magazine

First published in The Times (London) during the 1920s, Kitchen Essays explains the proper way to make Lobster Newburg while offering fascinating insight into the social history of England.

Agnes Jekyll felt that cooking should fit the occasion and temperament and states that "a large crayfish or lobster rearing itself menacingly on its tail seems quite at home on a sideboard of a Brighton hotel-de-luxe, but will intimidate a shy guest at a small dinner-party." And that "a hardy sportsman should not be fed in the same way as a depressed financier."

Agnes Jekyll (18601937) was the daughter of William Graham, Liberal MP for Glasgow and patron of the Pre-Raphaelites. A celebrated hostess and entertainer, her first dinner party included Robert Browning, John Ruskin, and Edward Burne-Jones. She lived in Surrey, England.

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Price: $9.04 [Notify me when price goes down.]