It can be quite easy at the moment to feel like we live in dystopian times which is why this month we were in the mood for fiction that is anything but. Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, our June choice, has been described by the novelist Tracy Chevalier as “irresistible, a perfect mix of wistfulness and joy, substance and froth.” As much as we like a fizzy escapist novel, it is the grit that really makes all the charm of Miss Pettigrew so pleasurable. We were intrigued to learn that the book’s author Winifred Watson had to wrangle with her original publisher Metheun to get it published in the first place: she had made her name writing steamy rustic romances (of the kind mocked in Stella Gibbons’ Cold Comfort Farm) and they were not at all sure about this adventure with a nightclub hostess that was more cocaine and comedy than passionate romance in a rural setting.