- All our books
- Categories:
- Abroad
- Adultery
- America
- Architecture
- Biography
- Bloomsbury
- Childhood
- Cookery Books
- Country Life
- Diaries
- Education
- Family
- Fathers
- Gender and Race
- Grandmothers
- History
- House and Garden
- Humour
- Ireland
- London
- Love Story
- Men (books about)
- Men (books by)
- Mothers
- Poetry
- Politics
- Science Fiction
- Scotland
- Sex
- Shopping
- Short Stories
- Single Women
- Social Comedy
- Suffragettes
- Teenagers (books for)
- Thrillers
- Translations
- Victoriana
- Widows
- Woman and Home
- Women’s Place
- Working Women
- WWI
- WWII
- Young Love
- Persephone Merch.
- Audiobooks
- Book Tokens
- Notebook
- Persephone Classics
- Catalogue
Find a book

A Book a Month
We can send a book a month for six or twelve months - the perfect gift. More »
Order This
'A very good novel indeed about the fragility and also the tenacity of love' wrote the Spectator about this 1953 novel by Dorothy Whipple, which was ignored fifty years ago because 'editors are going mad for action and passion' (as she was told by her publisher). But this last novel by a writer whose books had previously been bestsellers is outstandingly good by any standards. Apparently 'a fairly ordinary tale about the destruction of a happy marriage' (Nina Bawden in the Preface) yet 'it makes compulsive reading' in its description of an ordinary family ('Ellen was that unfashionable creature, a happy housewife') struck by disaster when the husband, in a moment of weak, mid-life vanity, runs off with a French girl. Dorothy Whipple is a superb stylist, with a calm intelligence in the tradition of Mrs Gaskell (both wrote in the Midlands and had similar preoccupations). 'The prose is simple, the psychology spot on' said the Telegraph, and John Sandoe Books commented: 'We have all delighted in this unjustly forgotten novel; it is well written and compelling.' The audiobook of Someone at a Distance is a Ducks in a Row production read by Susan Wooldridge and produced by Claire Cordier.
Our audiobooks are available in M4B format. M4B audio files can be played through Apple Books or Windows Media Player. You can also use third party apps found on your mobile's app store, such as BookPlayer for iOS or Sirin Audiobook player for Android.