On the day Nazanin arrives back in the UK: this is Eugenia Ginzburg, who was sent to Siberia for eighteen years. She started writing Into the Whirlwind in secret while in exile. More details about her life here.

Jacqueline Mesnil-Amar and her husband lived in Paris. When war broke out the family lived in Bordeaux, Marseille, Nice and nine different places in Paris, often separately because André was first in the French army and then joined a Jewish resistance network. In 1957 Jacqueline's diary for 18th July–25th August 1944 was published as Ceux qui ne dormaient pas, translated by Persephone Books as Maman, What Are We Called Now?  The heroism and bravery of someone Jewish continuing to live in Paris during the war is remarkable. But then the heroism and bravery of the people on the news at the moment is equally remarkable – ranging from those who are staying in Kiev, to the journalists who carry on calmly, to the Russians who dare to shout 'not in my name', to thousands if not millions of ordinary people we never hear about.

Anna Gmeyner left Germany and came to England, where she wrote Manja. Her daughter Eva became a well-known writer, for children and for adults, and one of her books, The Morning Gift, is something of a continuation of Manja. This month Anna's play Automatenbüfett (1932) is being performed in Cologne, details here. Anna was a refugee and her daughter a second-generation refugee, both were looked after and welcomed by the UK.

Irène Némirovsky was born in Kiev, 

Her father, Leonid (Aryeh) Nemirovsky was a bank official, who was born in Yelysavethrad. His family came from Nemyriv in the Podillia region, where there was a large Jewish community. 

When the anti-Jewish pogroms began, Irène and her parents moved to St. Petersburg in 1914, and in 1917 to Moscow, farther away from the political turbulence in the capital. However, after the Bolsheviks came to power, they were forced to flee to the West: in December 1918 to Finland, then Sweden and France, where they arrived in the summer of 1919 when Irène was 16.  The short stories in Dimanche were written in the 1930s and very early 1940s. One reader wrote to us last week saying that the scenes of refugees fleeing Ukraine reminded her very much of the descriptions in Suite Francaise and in the short stories we publish eg. 'Monsieur Rose'. (Dimanche is reprinting, but if you ring the shop you will find that we do have about twenty copies for the persistent.)

And we cannot end a week of Persephone books meant (meant) to cheer us up without having Miss Pettigrew, our bestselling title which remains a total joy. Interesting that it was published just as Penguin were becoming a deeply influential publisher: what a difference it would have made to its fortunes, and eventually to Persephone Books, if it had ever been a Penguin. Well, not necessarily: the novel we publish next month, A Well Full of Leaves by Elizabeth Myers, came out as a Penguin in 1947, four years after its original publication and still sank without trace. So if Miss P had been a Penguin it might have had an afterlife, like so many Penguins on all our shelves (The Pursuit of Love, Brideshead Revisited, Mariana), but might not. (The list of the first ten Penguins is a fascinating topic; one would not have chosen any of them nowadays. That says something fascinating about the literary canon and taste.)

As the war goes on, and Britain, or rather the Home Office behaves so appallingly about refugees (you might think that after Windrush we would have sorted out our humanity, but apparently not) it is really quite hard to cheer oneself up with a good book. But what about Good Evening, Mrs Craven? It is set in wartime but is funny and most importantly celebrates values of humanity, kindness, 'carrying on', bravery indeed. We heartily recommend it.

Yesterday we put up an Instagram 'post' about our  three refugee writers, the two who could not leave (Hamburg/Paris) but survived, and the two who did not manage to escape. On the Persephone Post today something completely different: our third frivolous, hot water bottle book. And yet like all the best books it has a serious edge. This is especially true of Diary of a Provincial Lady which is hilarious but has a very dark aspect, and despite the humour is one of the most feminist books you will ever read. This photograph shows EM Delafield during WW1, fifteen years before she began satirising her provincial life.