Winter in the Air : ‘Masterpieces: hand yourself over to be enchanted.’ (Guardian)

This Christmas, ‘hand yourself over to be enchanted’ (Guardian) by the English genius behind witchcraft classic Lolly Willowes.

‘Worth £9.99 for the book jacket alone (trust Faber) … It’s exquisite and shivery, just like the stories within … By turns creepy, melancholy, horrifying, tragic and beltingly romantic.’ Sunday Times’One of our finest writers.’ Neil Gaiman’One of the most shamefully under-read great British authors of the past 100 years.’ Sarah Waters’Diminutive masterpieces … Hand yourself over to be enchanted.’ Guardian’Extraordinary, lucid wildness.’ Helen MacDonald’Glinting perfection’ The TimesDecades after her divorce, a lady returns to the village of her tumultuous marriage. A railway carriage hosts a charged schoolboy encounter. A murder raises fears of blackmail. A woman waits anxiously in a café before eloping to Paris. Another steals a friend’s kitchen knife.

In these bittersweet tales, the author of Lolly Willowes reveals her mastery of the short story, celebrated by the New Yorker for decades. Sylvia Townsend Warner is a tragicomic chronicler of the heart’s entanglements, from marriages and affairs to widowhood; and a champion of outsiders, whether single women, the elderly or wartime refugees.

Witty and subversive, her stories meld tradition and transgression, with secret sins and fetishes as much a feature of English life as eccentric aunts, country houses and parish churches.