Peking Picnic Reissued

Owners of lovely bookshops Daunt Books are now purveyors of their own lovely books too; a seller becoming a publisher . They specialise in publishing “brilliant, yet neglected books” (you can check out their catalogue here). Their latest is a reissue of Ann Bridge’s Peking Picnic, from 1932. It was her first novel and one of only two she wrote about China (The Ginger Griffin being the other). You can read a good summation of the novel here – a classic that I’d rank alongside Acton’s Peonies and Ponies as a description of the life of privileged foreigners in Peking between the wars). If you’ve read it before then it’s worth a re-read and if you’ve never read it, then shame on you!