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

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'One of our finest writers.' Neil Gaiman 'One of the most shamefully under-read great British authors of the past100 years.' Sarah Waters 'Diminutive masterpieces ... Hand yourself over to be enchanted.'Guardian 'Extraordinary, lucid wildness.' Helen MacDonald 'Glinting perfection' The Times Decades after her divorce, a lady returns to the village of her tumultuousmarriage. A railway carriage hosts a charged schoolboy encounter. A murder raises fears of blackmail. A woman waits anxiously in a cafe before elopingto Paris. Another steals a friend's kitchen knife. In these bittersweet tales, the author of Lolly Willowes reveals her mastery ofthe short story, celebrated by the New Yorker for decades. Sylvia TownsendWarner is a tragicomic chronicler of the heart's entanglements, from marriagesand affairs to widowhood; and a champion of outsiders, whether singlewomen, the elderly or wartime refugees. Witty and subversive, her stories meld tradition and transgression, with secretsins and fetishes as much a feature of English life as eccentric aunts, country houses and parish churches.

Sylvia Townsend Warner (1893-1978) was a poet, novelist,journalist and musicologist. She grew up in Devonshireand was home-schooled for her rebellious behaviour. AfterWorld War II disrupted her musical studies, she moved toLondon to work in a munitions factory. With her partnerValentine Ackland, whom she lived with from 1930 untilher death, Warner was active in the Communist Party in thefight against fascism and served in the Red Cross during theSpanish Civil War. She wrote her acclaimed debut, LollyWillowes, in 1926, followed by six more novels and hundredsof stories and political articles.

"Original, elegant and hypnotically strange." -- New York Times "What a witty, poetic, clairvoyant writer ... Genius." -- John Updike "One of our finest writers." -- Neil Gaiman "One of our most idiosyncratic, courageous and versatile writers." -- Hermione Lee "One of the most acute and intelligent writers of her age." -- Claire Harman "Like charades played by angels." -- Sunday Times "Glinting perfection ... Beautiful, unplaceable weirdness." Times