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1
Someone at a Distance (1953)
Published
Whipple’s last novel appeared in 1953; Persephone has helped return her domestic fiction to regular reading-group discussion. A French visitor’s arrival unsettles an apparently secure English marriage, and the force lies in small shifts of power, money and attention. Choose the Persephone edition for a novelist whose clarity can make emotional damage look deceptively ordinary.
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The fortnight in September (1931)
Published
Warmly received in 1931 and later revived by Persephone, Sherriff’s novel gives an ordinary family’s Bognor holiday the attention usually reserved for grand adventures. Preparations, small expenses and hopes for private freedom make the period social world tangible. Its present Persephone edition offers a good way back to a book whose quietness is an artistic choice, rather than an absence of events worth noticing.
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MISS PETTIGREW LIVES FOR A DAY (1938)
10.0/10on Open Library
Published
This 1938 comedy became one of Persephone’s conspicuous revival successes, so it is no longer a secret discovery. A struggling governess enters a glamorous woman’s chaotic day and discovers capacities that respectability had kept hidden. The illustrated Persephone edition preserves the fairy-tale briskness. Its class and sexual assumptions belong to its period; the generous excitement of female friendship remains the attraction.
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The home-maker (1924)
8.0/10on Open Library
Published
An immediate bestseller in 1924, The Home-Maker has acquired a further life through Persephone’s recovery of neglected domestic fiction. An unhappy mother and an unhappy breadwinner discover that their allotted roles do not match their abilities. The family’s children have inner lives of their own, which keeps the argument from becoming a simple diagram. A useful reissue for discussing who gets called naturally suited to care.
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The blank wall (1947)
Published
Holding’s 1947 suspense novel, now available from Persephone, turns the wartime household into a place of criminal danger. Lucia’s effort to protect her daughter must coexist with shortages, domestic duties and an absent husband. The neglected pleasure here is how ordinary obligations tighten the thriller’s trap. Its films may be more familiar than the book, but the patient attention to a mother’s practical thinking is worth recovering.
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The Vet's Daughter (1981)
6.0/10on Open Library
Published
First published in 1959 and subsequently reissued by Virago and NYRB Classics, Comyns’s novel deserves space beyond the usual lists of strange little books. Alice’s plainspoken account of a brutal household gradually admits the impossible without losing its peculiar directness. The NYRB edition provides an accessible route. Expect cruelty and abuse; the voice’s apparent innocence makes the experience more disturbing, rather than cosy.
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The Moonflower Vine (1962)
Published
A bestseller in the 1960s, Carleton’s Missouri family novel returned through Harper Perennial in 2009 with Jane Smiley’s introduction. Its shifts among family members revise the affectionate picture established at the start. The reason to bring it back is that patient movement from shared family legend to private disappointment. Look for the Harper Perennial edition, and allow the apparently familiar rural setting to become less settled as the voices accumulate.
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Ex-wife (1929)
8.0/10on Open Library
Published
Published anonymously in 1929, Parrott’s bestseller returned in McNally Editions’ 2023 reissue. A divorce and its aftermath expose the practical costs beneath Jazz Age freedom: earning, drinking, friendship and the terms men offer women. Its dry, quick intelligence makes the revival more than a period curiosity. Some sexual attitudes are punishing, which is part of the world the novel records rather than a promise of easy liberation.
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The stone face (1963)
8.0/10on Open Library
Published
NYRB’s 2021 reissue brought renewed attention to Smith’s 1963 novel about a Black American journalist in Paris. What first seems refuge becomes an encounter with French violence against Algerians and the limits of expatriate comfort. The novel deserves discussion for making solidarity a difficult choice with consequences. It includes racist violence and historical trauma; its Paris is deliberately more troubling than the familiar artist-abroad idyll.
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The Narrows (1953)
Published
Petry’s 1953 novel has lived in the shadow of The Street, rather than being forgotten by every readership. The Virago edition with Kaitlyn Greenidge’s introduction offers a way to reconsider it. A Black graduate working as a bartender and a wealthy white woman become entangled within a Connecticut town’s racial and class divisions. The surrounding community gives the affair its destructive pressure; this is social observation with real narrative heat.
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Black Wings Has My Angel (1953)
9.0/10on Open Library
Published
Chaze’s 1953 paperback original returned as an NYRB Classic in 2016 after a long period outside ordinary trade circulation. A prison escapee needs a partner for a robbery and finds someone whose appetite for money matches his own. The revival is justified by the hard, vivid language and the shifting balance between the pair. Choose it for bleak noir with violence and sexual exploitation, rather than a charming criminal caper.
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The book of Ebenezer Le Page (1981)
Published
Published posthumously in 1981 and reissued by NYRB in 2007, Edwards’s novel survives above all through an extraordinary Guernsey voice. Ebenezer’s family quarrels, friendships and grievances gradually record the pressures of war, occupation and tourism on his island. The present NYRB edition gives this distinctive speaking presence room to work. His opinions need not become the reader’s; the pleasure is hearing a whole place through one limited, stubborn consciousness.
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Journey by moonlight (2001)
2.0/10on Open Library
Published
Szerb’s 1937 Hungarian novel reached a new English readership through Len Rix’s Pushkin translation, still available in the Pushkin Classics range. A honeymoon in Italy releases memories and desires that respectable adult life has failed to contain. Its light, ironic movement can turn unexpectedly towards grief and the attraction of death. This is delayed English-language discovery, not a claim that Hungarian readers had mislaid their own classic.
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Abigél (1973)
10.0/10on Open Library
Published
Abigail was already deeply loved in Hungary before Len Rix’s English translation appeared from NYRB in 2020. A wilful teenager resents being sent to a strict wartime boarding school, where rules and loyalties mean more than she initially understands. Its gradual enlargement from school story into danger makes it worth discussing beyond Szabó’s better-known English titles. The rediscovery belongs to a translation market, not to the book’s original readers.
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E' stato così (1949)
10.0/10on Open Library
Published
The Dry Heart first appeared in 1947 and gained a fresh English edition from New Directions in 2019. Its narrator announces the killing of her husband at the outset, leaving the short novel to examine the loneliness and humiliations preceding it. Ginzburg’s restrained voice makes the pressure unusually concentrated. The New Directions edition is an approachable physical commitment, though emotional coldness and domestic misery make it an exacting read.
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The tortoise and the hare, a novel (1954)
Published
Jenkins’s 1954 novel continues its life in Virago’s reissues, including a new paperback edition in 2025. An apparently unlikely rival exposes what an admired marriage has taught its wife to overlook. Its acute observation of possessions, competence and conversational authority keeps the social comedy uncomfortable. The sexual politics are rooted in their period; that makes the distribution of confidence and power particularly useful to discuss.
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The Rector's Daughter (1924)
Published
First issued by the Hogarth Press in 1924 and later carried into the Virago Modern Classics catalogue, Mayor’s novel deserves attention for the scale of feeling inside a restricted life. Mary’s duties in a fading rectory have left little room for desire until an attachment unsettles her apparent contentment. The Virago edition provides a route back. Its conventions can feel remote, but the scrutiny of emotional dependence remains painfully precise.
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the oppermanns (1934)
Published
Written as the Nazis consolidated power in 1933, this family novel returned in McNally Editions’ 2022 edition, with Joshua Cohen revising James Cleugh’s translation. A prosperous Jewish family struggles to understand how quickly its assumptions about German civic life have ceased to protect it. Its renewed force lies in that uneven recognition across businesses, schools and households. Expect persecution and violence, with no comforting distance from the choices people make.
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The hearing trumpet (1976)
8.7/10on Open Library
Published
Carrington’s novel, first published in English in 1976, has travelled through Exact Change’s reprints to NYRB’s edition with Olga Tokarczuk’s afterword. An elderly woman’s move into a peculiar home opens into an extravagant surreal adventure. It deserves a conversation separate from the painter’s biography: the comic voice makes age a source of unruly possibility. Choose the NYRB edition if you welcome abrupt transformations and little obedience to realism.
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The expendable man (1963)
8.0/10on Open Library
Published
Hughes’s final novel appeared in 1963 and found renewed readership through editions from Persephone and NYRB. A doctor gives a young hitchhiker a lift, then finds himself under suspicion when she is killed. The book makes the reader’s own assumptions part of its suspense, so descriptions that disclose every detail do it no favours. The NYRB edition is a useful route to crime writing that joins narrative tension to a precise view of social vulnerability.
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