Hesperus Press is a small independent publisher, quietly devoted to shining a light into the shadows cast by the literary canon to rescue those titles that have – often through no fault of their own – simply disappeared from sight. Thus have some of the more obscure works of writers such as Jane Austen (Sanditon), Henry Miller (Aller Retour New York), George Bernard Shaw (The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God; On War) and Ernest Hemingway (On Paris) been dragged out of the darkness, dusted off and placed back into the public domain where they belong (complete with new introductions from the likes of Colm Tóibín, Matthew Sweet, Fay Weldon and Mark Rylance).

Now, to celebrate its 10-year anniversary, Hesperus is asking members of the public to nominate a work of literature currently out of print and explain why it's worthy of republication. The winner will see their chosen work published this September with their pitch used as an introduction.

And guess what? Hesperus has agreed to accept entries posted on this site. So please post your own choice in the comments below. If you don't fancy entering the competition, that's fine: feel free to alert us all to the out-of-print books we should look out for anyway. If you intend to enter the completion, however, bear in mind you'll have to keep the word count below 500. If you'd prefer to keep your cards close to your chest and submit in private, then email your suggestion to info@hesperuspress.com. Full competition details can be found here.

(As an aside, and knowing Hesperus will be reading this piece, I wonder if they can do anything about getting John E Woods's translations of Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks and The Magic Mountain made available in paperback? As lovely as the Everyman hardback editions are – and they are – it seems a shame that most people will be coming to Mann's two masterpieces via the paperback editions with their inferior translations by HT Lowe-Porter. Here endeth the aside.)

So then, gamely flinging my own hat into the ring, I nominate William Trevor's 1966 novel The Love Department, which was last in print as a single title in the 80s and last seen in 2001, along with The Old Boys and The Boarding House, as part of the collection Three Early Novels – now also out of print.

I first stumbled across The Love Department a few years back in a secondhand book shop. I had yet to read any Trevor, and bought the book on a whim, Trevor being one of those authors whose name I recognised as someone I probably should read, without actually knowing anything about their work. Taken home, the book was promptly flipped through, shelved and forgotten. A few months later, while convalescing from an operation that had left me temporarily immobilised, and after trying and failing to read a number of works by my favourite authors, I found the simple prose and gentle (albeit black) humour of The Love Department was all my shattered concentration could deal with.

Set in the suburbs of south-west London (quirkily stylised a la Muriel Spark or a more upbeat Patrick Hamilton), the novel concerns one Edward Blakeston-Smith, a naive young man who, after fleeing some kind of monastery-cum-mental institution, is employed by an agony aunt to track down a serial seducer by the curious name of Septimus Tuam. (Which looks as if it should be an anagram, but, as far as I am able to tell, isn't.) Tuam is a kind of blandly satanic sociopath (think an introverted Mr Sloane) who is able to charm middle-aged married women into falling in love with him. Perhaps charm is too strong a word: the women, starved of romance from their husbands, seem ripe for seduction. The novel picks repeatedly at the social and private pretentions of the characters, revealing the fear of failure and loneliness that drives them from one pathos-drenched scene to the next.

Throughout the novel, the omniscient narrative voice maintains an ironic distance, slipping playfully among a fairly large cast of characters. This constantly shifting perspective gives the book an unsettling, almost dreamlike quality, which at the time I attributed to lack of sleep and too many painkillers. Rereading it two years on, however, I was pleasantly surprised to find these qualities still very much evident. Admittedly, The Love Department is not Trevor's finest work. The characterisation is slight, the structure a little haphazard, and it's perhaps 50 pages too long. But the story is engaging, the prose precise, the characters amusing, and the overall effect one of eccentric charm. As one of the characters muses at one point, "the streets of London are full of strangeness". The Love Department is a fine example of it.