Portable Magic by Emma Smith

Gathering together a millennium's worth of pivotal encounters with volumes big and small, Smith reveals that, as much as their contents, it is books' physical form - their 'bookhood' - that lends them their distinctive and sometimes dangerous magic. It illuminates the ways in which our relationship with the written word is more reciprocal - and more turbulent - than we tend to imagine.

£10.99 PB

Selected Stories by Saki

Saki's dazzling tales manage the remarkable feat of being anarchic and urbane at the same time. Studded with Wildean epigrams and featuring well-contrived plots and surprise endings, his stories gleefully skewer the pompous hypocrisies of upper-class Edwardian society. But they go beyond mere satire, raising dark humour to extremes of entertaining outrageousness that have rarely since been matched.

£10.99 HB

The Sandcastle by Iris Murdoch

When Bill Mor falls in love with Rain Carter he discovers a new way of being. Suddenly there is joy to be found in the world and his surroundings. To be with Rain he must abandon his prosaic life as a schoolmaster, his domineering wife Nan and his troubled teenaged children. He must draw on the powers of selfishness, hatred and anger in order to make the final break. But what love could survive all that violence?

£12.99 PB

Virginia Woolf’s Garden

Monk's House in Sussex is the former home of Leonard and Virginia Woolf. It was bought by them in 1919 as a country retreat. From the overgrown land behind the house they created a brilliant patchwork of garden rooms, linked by brick paths, secluded behind flint walls and yew hedges. The story of this magical garden is the subject of this book and the author has selected quotations from the writings of the Woolfs which reveal how important a role the garden played in their lives, as a source of both pleasure and inspiration.

£30 HB