Winter in the Air and Other Stories - Sylvia Townsend Warner

Winter in the Air & Other Stories by Sylvia Townsend Warner / ISBN 9780571375462 / 253-page paperback with flaps from Faber & Faber

***

"Diminutive masterpieces ... Hand yourself over to be enchanted." — Guardian

"Extraordinary, lucid wildness." — Helen MacDonald

"One of our finest writers." — Neil Gaiman

"One of the most shamefully under-read great British authors of the past 100 years. " — Sarah Waters

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 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

Sylvia Townsend Warner (1893–1978) was a poet, short-story writer, and novelist. Her first novel, Lolly Willowes, appeared in 1926 and was the first ever Book-of-the-Month Club selection. Over the course of her long career, Warner published six more novels, seven books of poetry, a translation of Proust, fourteen volumes of short stories, and a biography of T.H. White.