I subscribe to Persephone Books mailing list, and they send out an occasional email newsletter as well. Yesterday I received the newsletter that had a special offer--buy two books and get the third one free. Considering the cost of these books (when you adjust the price from Pounds Sterling to US dollars and add a rather steep shipping charge--keeping in mind that right now it is nearly $2 to the Pound!) that seemed like a pretty generous offer, and I am not sure how often this sort of deal comes around. In the end I couldn't pass it up. I had planned on ordering from them before the end of the year once more, so I thought I should take advantage of the offer now. Merry Christmas to me a few months early.
The deal is you buy The Fortnight in September by RC Sherriff (as September winds down), and one other book, and you get one other title free. They kindly extended this offer to US and European readers as well. I had been planning on ordering the Sherriff book already, so I saw it as a kind of sign...In his memoir Sherriff described his book:
"The story was a simple one: a small suburban family on their annual fortnight’s holiday at Bognor: man and wife, a grown-up daughter working for a dressmaker, a son just started in a London office, and a younger boy still at school. It was a day-by-day account of their holiday from their last evening at home until the day they packed their bags for their return; how they came out of their shabby boarding house every morning and went down to the sea; how the father found hope for the future in his brief freedom from his humdrum work; how the children found romance and adventure; how the mother, scared of the sea, tried to make the others think she was enjoying it."
That sounds really appealing to me right now as Summer is winding down here. We've still had lots of warm days, but I have a feeling that they must be numbered. I also bought Marghanita Laski's The Village, which is a post-WWII story about "lovers divided by class". It's another novel of English village life that I've come to enjoy so much. My free book is Julia Strachey's Cheerful Weather for the Wedding. Strachey was the niece of Lytton Strachey and this novel was first published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf's Hogarth Press. "On her wedding day a girl knows she is about to make a serious mistake". The Guardian wrote that it is a "brilliant, bittersweet upstairs-downstairs comedy." This is another one I had been eying for some time. So now, bliss...I have good mail to look forward to in the next few weeks! The sale ends Monday morning, so I didn't waste any time choosing my books!
In her latest online letter, Nicola Beauman mentions she has just finished writing a biography of author Elizabeth Taylor. I don't see a listing yet on Amazon UK yet, but I will be keeping an eye out for it! And thanks to Tara for the heads up on the recent article in the Atlantic Monthly on Taylor. Unfortunately you can only read the first few paragraphs online, so I will be looking for a copy at the library (it appeared in the September issue). I'm so glad to see authors writing about her life and work!