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

A Month in the Country by J. L. Carr

A damaged survivor of the First World War, Tom Birkin finds refuge in the quiet village church of Oxgodby where he is to spend the summer uncovering a huge medieval wall-painting. Immersed in the peace and beauty of the countryside and the unchanging rhythms of village life he experiences a sense of renewal and belief in the future. Now an old man, Birkin looks back on the idyllic summer of 1920, remembering a vanished place of blissful calm, untouched by change, a precious moment he has carried with him through the disappointments of the years

£9.99 PB

The Children of Greene Know by Lucy M. Boston

Discover the timeless Carnegie-winning classic based on a real manor house, in a story steeped in history, magic and spirits from the past. 'Tolly has been sent to live with his great-grandmother, Mrs Oldknow, in an ancient manor house deep in the countryside. Green Knowe and its grounds are full of exciting toys, pictures and objects and there is so much to see and do. But not only that - the house is haunted! And the ghosts Toby, Alexander and Linnet all have their own stories to tell.

£12.99 HB

Hens Dancing by Raffaella Barker

When Venetia Summers’s husband runs off with his masseuse, the bohemian idyll she has strived to create for her young family suddenly loses some of its rosy hue. From her tumble-down cottage in Norfolk she struggles to keep up with the chaos caused by her two boys, her splendid baby daughter and the hordes of animals, relatives and would-be artists that live in her home. From juggling errant cockerels, jam-making frenzies and Warhammers, to unexpected romance. Hens Dancing is like a rural Bridget Jones’s Diary as it charts a year of Venetia’s madcap household.

£12.99 PB

Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome

A comic masterpiece that has never been out of print since it was first published in 1889.

Martyrs to hypochondria and general seediness, J.

and his friends George and Harris decide that a jaunt up the Thames would suit them to a 'T'. But when they set off, they can hardly predict the troubles that lie ahead with tow-ropes, unreliable weather forecasts and tins of pineapple chunks - not to mention the devastation left in the wake of J.'s small fox-terrier Montmorency.

£7.99 PB