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.

Pillar of society and stern upholder of Victorian values, god-fearing Norfolk merchant John Barnard presides over a large and largely unhappy family. This is their story – his brandy-swilling wife, their hapless offspring and their changing fortunes – over the decades. Sylvia Townsend Warner’s last novel, The Flint Anchor gloriously overturns our ideas of history, family and storytelling itself.

‘A novel created with solidity and subtlety of feeling, a fusion of warmth, wit and quietly biting shrewdness that are reminiscent of Jane Austen’ Atlantic Review

‘As a sustained work of historical imagination, it has few rivals … one of the most acute and intelligent writers of her age’ Claire Harman

‘The kind of novelist who inspires an intense sense of ownership in her fans’ Sarah Waters

Sukey Bond, a sixteen-year-old orphan, is sent to work as a servant at a farm on the remote Essex Marshes. There she falls in love with gentle, unworldly Eric, the son of the rector’s wife, only for them to be separated when their relationship is discovered. But nothing will deter Sukey in her quest to be reunited with her true love, even if it means seeking the help of Queen Victoria herself.

‘One of our most idiosyncratic, courageous and versatile writers’ Hermione Lee

‘One can’t be too thankful that Miss Townsend Warner has lived to discover the alchemist’s secret of transmuting the past into pure gold’ Hilary Spurling

The Reverend Timothy Fortune, ex-clerk of the Hornsey branch of Lloyds Bank, has found his vocation: to convert the inhabitants of the remote tropical island of Fanua to Christianity. Even when everyone except for a young boy called Lueli remains indifferent to his preaching, Mr Fortune’s good spirits cannot be dampened – until one day his faith is put to a terrible test.

‘This quizzical tale is so intensely moving’ Gillian Beer, New Statesman

‘Original, elegant and hypnotically strange’ Miranda Seymour, The New York Times

‘Sylvia Townsend Warner pursues the psychology of the story with beautiful accuracy’ John Carey

‘She is my husband’s mistress – and here am I, taking her out to dinner’

Sophia Willoughby of Blandamer House, upstanding Victorian matriarch, has packed her errant husband off to Paris with his mistress Minna. But when tragedy throws her life off balance Sophia goes to seek him out, and instead finds herself intensely attracted to the charismatic, bohemian Minna, who leads her on a wild, chaotic adventure through a city in the throes of revolution.

‘One of the great under-read British novelists of the twentieth century. This is my favourite of her novels’ Sarah Waters

‘Every page contains something brilliant, arresting or amusing, and one comes away from it staggered’ Claire Harman

The nuns who enter a medieval Norfolk convent are told to renounce the world, but the world still finds ways to trouble them, whether it is through fire, floods, pestilence, a collapsing spire, jealous rivalries, a priest with a secret or a plague of caterpillars. As we follow their daily lives over three centuries, this masterpiece of historical fiction re-creates a world run by women.

‘As an act of imagined history this novel has few rivals. Also, as it happens, a work of high, frequent comedy’ George Steiner, The Times Literary Supplement

‘Spellbinding . . . One starts rereading as soon as one has reached the last page’ Sunday Times

‘Magnificent’ Philip Hensher, Daily Telegraph

Lolly Willowes, so gentle and accommodating, has depths no one suspects. When she suddenly announces that she is leaving London and moving, alone, to the depths of the countryside, her overbearing relatives are horrified. But Lolly has a greater, far darker calling than family: witchcraft.

‘The book I’ll be pressing into people’s hands forever . . . It tells the story of a woman who rejects the life that society has fixed for her in favour of freedom … tips suddenly into extraordinary, lucid wildness’ Helen Macdonald

‘Witty, eerie, tender … her prose, in its simple, abrupt evocations, has something preternatural about it’ John Updike