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A Different Sound: Stories by Mid-Century Women Writers, selected by Lucy Scholes
In this collection of stories from the 1940s and 50s, we see life being lived in a world where everything is about to change. Authors like Daphne du Maurier, Elizabeth Jane Howard and Sylvia Townsend Warner take us from Cornwall to India and back, capturing the tensions of a society on the brink of transformation.
The Crazy Hunter, Kay Boyle
Just as April is the cruellest month, sometimes youth’s first confrontation with the world is not a glorious flowering, but a bitter torment. In this modernist gem, seventeen-year-old Nan finds herself caught between a stern mother and an unreliable father as the family struggle over the fate of a blind horse. Lush prose and psychological acuity mark this rediscovered classic, newly back in print.
Demian, Hermann Hesse
In the springtime of our lives, we struggle to answer the fundamental questions: Who am I? What do I stand for? How do I move forward? Here the Nobel prize-winning author of Siddhartha and Narcissus and Goldmund distils a young man’s coming-of-age story into a work of profound spiritual wisdom.
A Woman in the Polar Night, Christiane Ritter
Already weighed down by maturity and responsibility, sometimes we find ourselves bursting into flower again, as Christiane Ritter shows in this memoir of a year spent on Spitsbergen. From the depths of the coldest, darkest winter imaginable, the arctic – and the author – emerge into glorious colour and light.
Parisian Days, Banine
Banine was also only seventeen when she found herself on the Orient Express, heading towards Paris and dispossessed of her fortune by the Russian Revolution. She had lost everything, but in her new life she gained much more, as we read in this riotous memoir of freedom and fantasy amongst the émigrés and artists of 1920s Paris.
Available and more from Pushkin Press Classics