In July the Dovegreyreaders group is going to be reading Elizabeth Cambridge's Hostages to Fortune. While I am still slowly meandering my way through The Shuttle (it's meant to be a long term "serial" read--two chapters a week...though I have gotten a bit ahead of the schedule), the group chooses a different book from Persephone Books' backlist to read every other month. Hostages to Fortune is a domestic novel starting with the birth of a first child in 1915 through 1933 when the book was published. It is set in an Oxfordshire village. The catalog blurb mentions that "there is no plot as such, and yet the reader becomes absorbed in a life which is in one sense faraway and in another, not very different from many such lives today".
As I had to order the Cambridge, I couldn't resist opting for the discount you receive when you buy three titles. I finally have gotten around to ordering a title by Dorothy Whipple. I have heard so many good things about her and had a hard time choosing between the four titles they publish. In the end I opted for The Priory. It is a nice big, chunky book! I know it is silly, but Persephones are not terribly cheap to get in the US, so I feel like I am getting my money's worth--536 pages! This is another novel set in a large house in England ("which has seen better times").
As I am hoping to read E.M. Forster's A Passage to India sometime soon, I thought Emma Smith's The Far Cry might serve as a nice foil (thanks also to Equiano for the idea!). It's about a young girl's passage to India with her elderly father. Elizabeth Bowen wrote of it, "I can think of no other writer, British or Indian, who has captured so vividly, with such intensity, the many intangibles of the Indian kaleidoscope". Why does something set in India sound so appealing right now? As a matter of fact I am very much in the mood to read a Persephone title!
By the way LK and Kate S. are going to be reading The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy in July. It has just been republished here in the US by NYRB Classics (who I really, really want need to order from...have you looked at the tempting list of titles they publish?). I have had an old Virago edition of the Dundy on my shelves for quite a long time (Litlove has on more than one occasion recommended this to me), so I am thinking I need to go find it and dust it off and finally read it! It's a sign, and you can't ignore the bookgods when they send signs like this.