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Forthcoming

The next Persephone book will be PB no. 150, The Third Persephone Book of Short Stories. It will be published on April 18th, 2024 to mark our 25th anniversary.

The stories contained in this collection are variously funny, tragic, and perceptive; the tone and style vary enormously between them, while the settings shift from wartime Paris to suburban California to the foothills of an Italian mountain range. A number also reveal the tensions that emerge when comfortable middle-class lives are thrown into turmoil by global disasters like war. The thirty stories appear in the order they were published, the earliest dating from 1911 (‘Turned’ by Charlotte Perkins Gilman) and the most recent from 1996 (‘Soupe du Jour’ by Carol Shields); there is also a brief biography of each writer at the back of the book.

Stories featured in the collection include:

-‘Pluck’ by Gertrude Colmore (1913) - a suffragette upends the expectations of a man in a teashop because she had saved a child from drowning in Regent’s Canal.

-‘Le Spectateur’ (1939) by Irène Némirovsky - a vivid, horrifying story about an American leaving Paris at the outbreak of World War Two who is bombed out of his complacency by a torpedo hitting the ship that is carrying him away from the fighting.

-‘People Don’t Want Us’ by Janet Lewis (1946) - a Japanese family living in suburban California experience a change in how their neighbours treat them in the immediate aftermath of Pearl Harbour.

-‘An Evening to Remember’ by Rosamunde Pilcher (1985) - a man hoping for a promotion invites his boss round for dinner but he turns up on the wrong day.

-‘Anniversary’ by Siân James (1990) - a new mother attends a dinner party then starts a love affair with the man who gives her and her baby a lift home.

The Third Persephone Book of Short Stories follows The Persephone Book of Short Stories, published in 2012 to celebrate Persephone’s 100th book, and The Second Persephone Book of Short Stories, published in 2019 to celebrate twenty years of Persephone Books.


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