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 Willowesreveals 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.

Sylvia Townsend Warner (1893-1978) was a poet, novelist, journalist and musicologist. She grew up in Devonshire and was home-schooled for her rebellious behaviour. After World War II disrupted her musical studies, she moved to London to work in a munitions factory. With her partner Valentine Ackland, whom she lived with from 1930 until her death, Warner was active in the Communist Party in the fight against fascism and served in the Red Cross during the Spanish Civil War. She wrote her acclaimed debut, Lolly Willowes, in 1926, followed by six more novels - Mr Fortune's Maggot, The True Heart, Summer Will Show, After the Death of Don Juan, The Corner That Held Them, and The Flint Anchor - and hundreds of stories and political articles.