The Persephone titles I chose for their three for the price of two sale have arrived. It's always so hard chosing, but in the end I settled on Winifred Peck's House-Bound about women/wives who must manage on their own due to the scarcity of servants during and after WWII; Joanna Cannan's Princes in the Land about a woman who's raised her children and at the end is left wondering just what it was all for (subtley--she asks this qestion); and Molly Hughes's A London Child of the 1870s which sounds very memoir-ish (and entertaining) about an ordinary Victorian family.
I didn't stop there, I'm afraid. I indulged with a few others as well. Laura Wilson's Stratton's War is a book I've been trying to get from the Book Depository, but both times I tried to order it they cancelled on me and said it was not available. Weird, so I went to Alibris and looked for another source. It's a mystery set in London in 1940. Cornflower has recommended Susanna Kearsley's Sophia's Secret, and as I love good historical fiction I had to take her up on the suggestion. I really enjoyed a novel I listened to last year by Katharine McMahon, and I want to read some of her other books, so I indluged in a recent reissue of Confinement, which is set during the Victorian era as well as in the 1960s. Alan Furst is another author that came recommended as a good writer of spy novels and his newly released The Spies of Warsaw caught my eye. And I've wanted to read Barbara Cleverly's Joe Sandilands's mysteries set in 1920s India, so I bought the second instalment, Ragtime in Simla, to keep the first one sitting by my bedside, company.
One more. Although we won't be discussing the next Slaves book until the end of August, I ordered Dawn Powell's Dance Night already, so it will be close at hand.
"It is sometime prior to World War I in Lamptown, Ohio, a working-class town filled with factory girls (Young Nettie Farrell complains: 'Every time a new man comes to town it's like dividing a mouse up for a hundred cats.'). Every Thursday night at the Casino Dance Hall women and a few men gather to escape their pedestrian lives in fantasy, and sometimes to live out these fantasies. Observing all are the novel's two young protagonists, Morry, who dreams of becoming an architect and developer, and Jen, an unsentimental orphan of fourteen who, abandoned by her mother, dreams of escape."
Doesn't that sound good? If you're intrigued there's lots of time to get a copy. Everyone is, as always, welcome to join in our discussion.
I've been very good lately about not starting new books (even though I talk about what I want to read all the time here), so I'm thinking I might need to pick one of these up to read over the long weekend...