In October I launched my Conversations series, with a Q&A with Kirsten Cram, author of the tender and luminous Starling. I published it here and shared excerpts on Instagram (divided in part I and part II) . Then in November i shared again the one I did back in 2023 with Janet Skeslien Charles, who writes historical fiction that focus on strong women and the healing, vivifying, uniting power of books. I shared it on Instagram too, here, and here

This month, my guest is Rebeka Russell, founder of Manderley Press. This young publishing house focuses on book with a strong sense of place. Their selection is varied and the designs arresting. I have read Letters from New-York and Florence: ordeal by Water, but I have collected quite a few that I’m eager to read soon. And I love that the books all arrive carefully packed, with matching bookmarks. It always feels like receiving a thoughtful gift!

Rebeka was kind enough to take the time to really engage with my questions, and now I can’t wait to see what the house has in store for 2026! In the meantime I am very happy to share this conversation with you. Enjoy!

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Hi Rebeka, I am curious, when you launched Manderley Press, how did you decide what title to publish first? It was Edinburgh by R.L. Stevenson, right?
Yes, that’s right. Robert Louis Stevenson felt like the perfect starting point because Edinburgh: Picturesque Notes embodies exactly what I wanted Manderley Press to be all about: rediscovered literature that is deeply inspired by place. Moreover, by chance it happened to be the book I had out on loan from the library when lockdown kicked in at the start of the Covid 19 pandemic. This timing was important here – the book is a love letter to the city, written by one of its most well-known authors.
And it also allows the reader to armchair travel – which, particularly at this time, was such a vital benefit of the act of reading for me. Launching Manderley Press with such an iconic writer was also the perfect opportunity to highlight a text that is both classic, and at the same time, slightly overlooked — it is not one of Stevenson’s more famous novels, but instead a work that showcases his impeccable eye for detail, his wit and his sense of history and drama too. And of course, the book is fascinating not just for its portrait of Edinburgh and its darker stories, but because it helps to explain the context and inspiration for so many of Stevenson’s later works.

Why this interest in places? How was it born?
I’ve always been fascinated by the way certain landscapes, towns or cities leave their imprint on writers. Places can become characters in their own right (for example, Manderley – the house in Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca – which was the inspiration behind the name of my publishing house); they can also shape one’s mood and memory, and fire the imagination too.
The idea for Manderley Press grew from a strong desire to explore that connection – to publish forgotten books which are as much about their background location as they are about people. And I also hope to encourage readers to look at familiar locations in new, literary ways.
Next year I am really excited to be republishing a book set in and inspired my hometown of Whitby, which is already literary insofar as it is connected indelibly with Bram Stoker’s Dracula. I am thrilled to be able to expand the narrative and hopefully make more of the other authors who are connected with the town.
This has been one of the most rewarding elements of republishing Mary Shelley in Bath – a collection of Shelley’s journal entries, letters, short stories and crucially, chapter four of Frankenstein – all written in or inspired by the short time Mary spent living in Bath in 1816-17. The city is often connected, and rightly so, with Jane Austen. However, its power and influence over other writers lives on strongly, and always has!

What are you looking for when searching for your next release?
I’m always on the lookout for books that knit together literary merit and fabulous storytelling with a strong sense of place. Sometimes it’s awell-loved classic that deserves to be reintroduced; other times it’s a forgotten gem that has slipped out of print. I love the thrill of finding these books or diaries or letters! What matters is that each one captures the spirit of a place (or especially a house or building or landmark) with vividness and originality, and that it still speaks to contemporary readers – either because the landscape hasn’t changed much, or because the author’s way of seeing it feels timeless.

Then comes the next exciting part of the journey to publication – finding the perfect writer and artist to showcase the book in its new edition: the introduction and the front cover must be by creatives who share a link to the places or the stories at the heart of each book in question. It is an utter joy to commission new work to celebrate forgotten classics in this way. This happened most recently with a book I will be publishing next year on International Women’s Day in March. Woman Alive is an almost completely forgotten dystopian novel, sci-fi really, which was written in 1936 but set in a futuristic London of 1985. I discovered that the actor, broadcaster and author Graham Norton was a fan of the author Susan Ertz and, rather wonderfully, he agreed to write the most perfectly engaging introduction to this new edition. I cannot wait to get this book out on shelves – if you enjoyed Margret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, George Orwell’s 1984, or Naomi Alderman’s The Power, then you’ll probably love this rediscovered gem too. 

I picture you visiting archives and libraries, hunting for lost treasures. Am I close to the truth? Tell us about your process.
That’s definitely part of it! I love going into archives, old bookshops and libraries, following trails of references from the back of books, or obscure mentions in other titles. Sometimes it’s as simple as finding a forgotten edition of something rather special on a dusty shelf and realising it deserves a new life. At other times, it involves proper detective work – piecing together context, looking for illustrations or ephemera and imagining how best to bring a book back into print so that modern readers can experience it afresh.
For example, I was delighted when I found a copy of Florence: Ordeal by Water on the shelves of the London Library – this book is the perfect title, documenting a specific time and place in the history of the city through the author’s diary entries (it covers the historic flooding of the River Arno in 1966) and the author was already known to me: Kathrine Kressmann Taylor wrote the iconic bestseller Address Unknown, one my favourite novellas, first recommended by a customer I happened to be serving as a young bookseller when I worked at Daunt Books in London. And so I was smitten. When I later found out that this book about Florence had inspired Sarah Winman’s Still Life, I was literally jumping with joy. And all because I happened to be browsing one particular stack at the library!

Do you believe in serendipity? How does it manifest in your work?
I absolutely believe in serendipity! See all of my above answers! Some of the most exciting Manderley Press finds have come about from chance encounters with special writers or artists, from after dinner chats with friends and family (especially with my two wonderful daughters) and even from social media scrolling – a seemingly random spotting of the most perfect literary specimen as it flashes by on the screen, and just knowing it ticks all the boxes.
That was the case with our bestseller The Strange House by Raymond Briggs – our latest children’s book – which I first saw on Instagram, and which we brought back to life with all its original illustrations throughout (including the cover) but with a brand new introduction by Chris Riddell. It turns out he had been a student of Raymond Briggs in the 1980s and remembers this book being discussed in lectures at art school. Sometimes there are just too many golden threads linking old books to new authors and new readers; their histories are intertwined with our reading tastes today, even if we don’t yet know this. Serendipity is what brings all this to life…

What are your objectives for Manderley Press in 2026?
I’ve been growing slowly over the past four years but in 2026 I have six superb titles all lined up for publication, and another six already planned for the following year too. So my plan is to reach more readers, here in Europe but also across the pond in America and further afield too.
These books have been carefully selected to appeal to a wide range of readers, of all ages, and each celebrates a place but also a specific time in history (recently, and more historically too). I can’t wait to launch the next Helene Hanff in our list – Underfoot in Show Business – this time set on Broadway in New York. This book rewinds history a little further than Letter from New York (our first of her titles, set in the 1970s and 80s) and follows her life on the fringes of the theatre world in the 1940s. It is hilarious, poignant and quirky and is in fact a tonic for our times, even if it technically harks back to a bygone golden era.
As you can tell, these books reflect my own interest in travel and literature and history, and my love of art too, so it would be a dream come true to be able to spread the word and find the perfect way to link new books to old places. I love it when readers get in touch to tell me that they have picked up a Manderley Press book in a shop in the destination they were visiting, which speaks to them about that special place from their holiday. This is always in the back of my mind, and helps me to think about how to place future books and how to make this easier for booksellers to find our books relevant for their customers too. Above all, my aim is to carry on uncovering hidden treasures, bringing them back into the light, and building a catalogue that feels like a literary map of the world.

Watch this space, and thank you so much for all these really engaging and inspiring questions.

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Many thanks to Rebeka for her thoughtful answers. I don’t know about you but I can’t wait to see what will be on the Manderley Press catalogue next year! Follow @manderleypress on Instagram for updates about their upcoming releases and snippets of the life of a young publishing house!