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This Christmas, bask in these 'diminutive masterpieces' (Guardian) by the English genius behind Lolly Willowes.
Decades 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 cafe 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.
Author: Sylvia Townsend Winter
Paperback Published 4 April 2023 304 pages
'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 Times