The Third Persephone Book of Short Stories

Published to mark the 25th anniversary of Persephone Books in Bath, England. The collection offers readers a chance to discover some great, often overlooked writers. And there are stories by Persephone favourites such as Dorothy Whipple, Mollie Panter-Downes, and Siân James and (as yet) non-Persephone authors such as Evelyn Sharp, Carol Shields and Rosamunde Pilcher.

The stories are variously funny, tragic, and perceptive; the tone and style varies enormously between them, while the settings shift from wartime Paris to suburban California to the foothills of an Italian mountain range. A number also reveal the tensions that emerge when comfortable middle-class lives are thrown into turmoil by global disasters like war. The thirty stories appear in the order in which they were published, the earliest dating from 1911 (‘Turned’ by Charlotte Perkins Gilman) and the most recent from 1996 (‘Soup du Jour’ by Carol Shields); there is also a brief biography of each writer at the back of the book.