A recent social media post about PB no. 67 The Fortnight in September by RC Sherriff led to scores of people commenting that it was their favourite book of all time. Inspired by this, we are asking you, Persephone readers, to write and tell us your Top Ten Favourite Novels: not the ones you think deserve a place in literary history or did at school, but instead the ones you really and truly love, and re-read, and lend to your friends. In some ways this is also a response to a similar exercise by the Guardian earlier this year that had interesting but provocative results. Please send us a list of your ten favourite novels, in no particular order, by replying to this email before the end of October and we will then count up the entries and announce the results. Here are ours for starters: Howards End, A Game of Hide and Seek, PB no. 3 Someone at a Distance, A Passage to India, PB no. 141 The Deepening Stream, The Tortoise and the Hare, Anna Karenina, Middlemarch, Ethel and Ernest and One Fine Day. 

A brief glance at politics (skim to the next paragraph if this annoys you): ghastly news assails us on all sides but we were so pleased about Ed Miliband’s statement last week. 'A stain on the conscience of the world and of this country too' indeed. If the horrors (eg Nepal, the 25th anniversary of 9/11) are not mentioned in this Letter it’s simply because: ‘Humankind cannot bear very much reality’. But we are always very, very conscious of them. Alas.

Further to the initiative to make Paris greener mentioned in the last Letter came some uplifting news from the Netherlands. There they have ripped out 6 million tiles in order to plant greenery. The initiative is called Tegelwippen (tile whip out) and it means that in Holland, without permission from any authority, anyone can take up paving stones and replace them with grass and plants. Read about it here. Actually this has been happening in Holland for the last ten years so goodness knows why we haven’t heard about it before. Could someone make it their life’s work to get it happening in the UK? Although, sadly, here it’s bound to be illegal and if one starts removing concrete slabs one will rapidly be up before the magistrate. But for starters we could try and persuade people not to pave over their gardens.

We are very much looking forward to the Persephone Day on 17th October, tickets are now on sale. There will be a craft workshop, a panel discussion, a talk, the launch of our latest title PB no. 155 Her Son's Wife by Dorothy Canfield Fisher, and and a screening of the film of PB no. 28 Little Boy Lost. Because we can only seat 60 people there is a friendly, we like to think homely, atmosphere, and we are proud that everyone chats to their neighbour. With the most obvious opening gambit being, isn't Dorothy Whipple wonderful?! Do join us if you can. 

By the time the next Persephone Letter is published the new exhibition at the Holburne will have opened: Ancient Landscape, Modern Times: Eric Ravilious and the Artists of the Chalk Downs runs from 3 October – 10 January 2027 and brings together works by (among others) Eric Ravilious, William Nicholson, Paul Nash, John Nash, Peggy Angus and our own Tirzah Garwood, author of PB no. 119 Long Live Great Bardfield. This is Judd's Farm by William Nicholson 1912, it's normally at the Towner in Eastbourne.

We are also looking forward to the Mozartfest in November (Paul Lewis! The Nash Ensemble!) and in particular to Harriet Walter and Lucy Parham’s event about Clara Schumann on November 15th at 6pm.

Do our readers know that a visit to Bath could be rounded off by a ten minute train ride to Bristol followed by a fifteen minute taxi ride to the Lido Townhouse which is a hotel attached to an excellent restaurant and an open air swimming pool? ‘Booking directly with the hotel grants you full access to the lido, which is just a few steps across a (very quiet) road in the hotel’s robes and slippers.’ Nor is the hotel ridiculously expensive so all in all this sounds like great fun. (A Guardian reader wrote about it here, scroll down.)

If we fail to get tickets for the British Museum's exhibition of the Bayeux Tapestry (which depicts the lead up to, and the actual, Battle of Hastings 960 years ago today) we won't be too upset. This is because we took the children in the ’80s and have miraculously managed to find our souvenir from that trip. 

Country Living magazine chose seven bookshops to celebrate the forthcoming Bookshop Day on October 10th. We are one of them: ‘This iconic Bath bookshop celebrates women’s writing in all its forms.’ 

Here in the shop we have seen a lovely surge in interest in Elizabeth Cambridge's Hostages to Fortune, PB no. 41, because of Laura Freeman’s piece about it in The Times (here for those who can get behind the paywall). As she said, ‘No other book I have read so convincingly captures the exhaustion, exasperation and enchantment of life with very young children.’ But the passage we treasure most from Laura’s piece is: ‘There are no villains or love affairs or dramatic final showdowns. The onions do well or badly. Curtains are run up, cheaply. The pram is pushed up the hill, slowly. Sometime an afternoon takes a chapter. Sometimes a decade passes between one page and the next. Friends with older children say this is just how it happens. Twenty years in the blink of an eye and every afternoon eternal.’ This last wonderful sentence deserves to be put on a Sussex Lustreware jug like ‘Always the bell rings and the baker calls’.

Finally, we would have written about Hermione Lee's new biography of Anita Brookner, and are delighted she is coming to Bath on September 22nd – do go, she is a marvellous speaker as well as being a superb writer – but sadly we are as one with Laura Cumming in the Observer: 'Lee writes compellingly about the novels, persuading us back to them right away (in my case, alas, still dismayed by the miserabilism and deaf to the vaunted comedy). In some ways Lee's biography is the exact opposite of a Brookner novel. It has joie de vivre, high humour and energetic compassion for the multiplying complexities of the human mind.' Ouch. (And in fact this would be a good description of a Forster novel: joie de vivre, humour and compassion in bucketloads.)

Nicola Beauman

8 Edgar Buildings, Bath