To Bed with Grand Music

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.