"When I picked up this 1949 reprint I offered it the tenderly indulgent regard I would any period piece. As it turned out, the book survives perfectly well on its own merit--although it nearly finished me. If you like a novel that expertly puts you through the wringer, this is the one."--Nicholas Lezard, "Guardian"

Hilary Wainwright, an English soldier, returns to a blasted and impoverished France during World War Two in order to trace a child lost five years before. But is this small, quiet boy in a grim orphanage really his son? And what if he is not? In this exquisitely crafted novel, we follow Hilary's struggle to love in the midst of a devastating war.

"Facing him was a thin little boy in a black sateen overall. Its sleeves were too short and from them dangled red swollen hands too big for the frail wrists. Hilary looked from these painful hands to the little boy's long thin grubby legs, to the crude coarse socks falling over shabby black boots that were surely several sizes too large. It's a foreign child, he thought numbly . . ."

Marghanita Laski was born in 1915 to a family of Jewish intellectuals in Manchester; Harold Laski, the socialist thinker, was her uncle. She was the author of six novels and a celebrated critic. She died in 1988.

This 1946 novel, originally published under a pseudonym, is about sex in wartime. At the beginning, Deborah and her husband are in bed, saying goodbye to each other before he is posted overseas. They swear eternal loyalty. But Deborah is very soon bored by her life in the country with her young son and gets a job in London. She then acquires a lover, and when he is posted overseas another, and another - This is the fourth novel by Marghanita Laski to be published by Persephone Books. Juliet Gardiner writes in her Preface: 'The fascination of TO BED WITH GRAND MUSIC is its unusual recreation of one aspect of the Home Front in the Second World War. It is an exaggerated, near harlot's tale without doubt, but it has a wry authenticity and provides a refreshing counterpoint to all the usual wartime novels of sterling women making do and mending. The book's appeal lies in its portrayal of someone who signally failed the test of warA", and in its evocation of a fractured and transient society during the exigencies and contingencies of wartime.'

This 'slim, brilliant, very scary novel' (John Sandoe Books) came out in 1953, four years after "Little Boy Lost". It is about a young married woman who lies down on a chaise-longue and wakes to find herself imprisoned in the body of her alter ego ninety years before. It impressed PD James, author of the "Preface", 'as one of the most skillfully told and terrifying short novels of its decade.'And Penelope Lively described it as 'disturbing and compulsive', commenting: 'This is time travel fiction, but with a difference...instead of making it into a form of adventure, what Marghanita Laski has done is to propose that such an experience would be the ultimate terror...so Melanie/Milly clings to the belief that she is dreaming for as long as she possibly can; the point at which she is forced to abandon this comfort and search for other explanations is her plunge into nightmare. 'In the stifling, menacing atmosphere in which Melanie finds herself there is another dark, unspoken theme. Sex. Milly has been in some way disgraced...Once again the chaise-longue is the hinge between the two planes of existence. The site of rapture, of ecstasy - that is the implication...'

'When I picked up this 1949 reprint I offered it the tenderly indulgent regard I would any period piece,' commented Nicholas Lezard in "The Guardian". 'As it turned out, the book survives perfectly well on its own merits - although it nearly finished me. If you like a novel that expertly puts you through the wringer, this is the one.' Hilary Wainwright, poet and intellectual, returns after the war to a blasted and impoverished France in order to trace a child lost five years before. The novel asks: is the child really his? And does he want him? These are questions you can take to be as metaphorical as you wish: the novel works perfectly well as straight narrative. It's extraordinarily gripping: it has the page-turning compulsion of a thriller while at the same time being written with perfect clarity and precision.'Had it not got so nerve-wracking towards the end, I would have read it in one go. But Laski's understated assurance and grip is almost astonishing. She has got a certain kind of British intellectual down to a tee: part of the book's nail-biting tension comes from our fear that Hilary won't do something stupid. The rest of "Little Boy Lost's" power comes from the depiction of post-wr France herself. This is haunting stuff.'