Winter in the Air

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, Sylvia Townsend Warner, the author of Lolly Willowes, reveals her mastery of the short story, celebrated by the New Yorker for decades. 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.

'One of our finest writers.' Neil Gaiman
'One of the most shamefully under-read great British authors of the past 100 years.' Sarah Waters