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Lolly Willowes
Lolly Willowes
Nov 30, 2025 9:17 AM

Author:Sylvia Townsend Warner

Lolly Willowes

Introducing Little Clothbound Classics: irresistible, mini editions of short stories, novellas and essays from the world's greatest writers, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith.

Celebrating the range and diversity of Penguin Classics, they take us from snowy Japan to springtime Vienna, from haunted New England to a sun-drenched Mediterranean island, and from a game of chess on the ocean to a love story on the moon. Beautifully designed and printed, these collectible editions are bound in colourful, tactile cloth and stamped with foil.

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 is Lolly Willowes . . . Starting as a straightforward, albeit beautifully written family saga, it tips suddenly into extraordinary, lucid wildness' Helen Macdonald

Reviews

The book I'll be pressing into people's hands forever is Lolly Willowes . . . Starting as a straightforward, albeit beautifully written family saga, it tips suddenly into extraordinary, lucid wildness

—— Helen Macdonald , The New York Times Book Review

A great shout of life and individuality ... an act of defiance that gladdens the soul

—— Justine Jordan , Guardian

My comfort read

—— Tracey Thorn

Beautiful and useful. His writing untangles the knots that tie us down, to families, to history. He writes to free us and deserves our thanks.

—— Spectator

Lyrical, yearning, elegiac

—— Daily Mail

Norris is a terrific writer. His characters not only convince, they're invested with a depth of personality that fixes them in the reader's mind long after the book has been replaced on the shelf... Undoubtedly one of the finest novels to come out of these islands this or any year.

—— New European

Norris's latest novel is a lyrical and affecting examination of love, life and the stories that shape us

—— Big Issue

A deft novel about a struggling thirtysomething man's chance meeting with a girl he once saved from drowning and the changes the event sets in motion.

—— Independent

A beautiful novel, introspective and thoughtful. Undercurrent washes with a quiet intensity.

—— Claire Fuller, author of Unsettled Ground

Undercurrent is a profound and absorbing story of flux, failures and joys that charts the beautiful, ineffable welter of life itself.

—— Alison MacLeod, author of Tenderness

What a beautiful, heartbreaking, wise, triumphant novel. Barney is an extraordinary writer, with a magical ability to reach into the depths of his characters' histories and chart the maps of their lives with grace and love and unstinting empathy. I always feel better about the world and the people in it after reading Barney's work.

—— Donal Ryan

Norris is a novelist of such insight and sensitivity that I found myself highlighting entire pages at a time to come back to. Compassionate and unnervingly funny in its depiction of love, grief, family and our points of origin, Undercurrent is a captivating sojourn in another consciousness. I feel like I know these people in real life. Understated but magical; quietly, utterly moving.

—— Luke Kennard, author of The Transition

Barney Norris has done it again and managed to destroy me with another book. Undercurrent is a powerful and really moving meditation on family and grief, written with all the thoughtfulness and grace I've come to expect from Barney's work.

—— Jan Carson, author of The Raptures

A novel that, at every moment, chooses to be vulnerable, daring to show as much feeling as it possibly can - all those loves and losses that make up a life.

—— Lamorna Ash, author of Dark, Salt, Clear

The best description I have read of ghosts. The process of becoming a spectre. Fragments and glimpses. Scattered memory. I loved it.

—— Danny Sapani

A gorgeous, noirish page-turner which also manages to be deeply intelligent. Norris has a remarkable ability to write about love and freedom - his writing shines a light on the way stories shape our lives.

—— Sophie Ratcliffe, author of The Lost Properties of Love

A visceral, beautifully-told, intergenerational story that reaches impossibly beyond the end of life to the first moments of love, through what we inherit from the past, what we may be able to create, and what we leave behind.

—— Professor Dan Hicks, author of The Brutish Museums

A novel about growing up after you have already grown up. Barney Norris writes with enormous compassion for his characters and the world around them

—— Sara Baume, author of Spill Simmer Falter Wither

I read Undercurrent with pleasure and admiration. Gripping and thoroughly absorbing

—— Abdulrazak Gurnah, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature

A perceptive novel about family and how the stories of the past we tell aren't always clear-cut

—— Good Housekeeping

This tender, thoughtful novel captures the dilemmas of being human - the mundane and momentous things left unsaid, and expectations we can't fulfil.

—— Woman & Home

Joyful

—— Stylist

This top-rank tale of beating the odds is full of heart and breezy charm

—— Metro

Altogether, it makes for a gripping and engaging read about a woman persevering against all odds, recognising your limits and knowing when to push back. As well as a complex and nuanced character study, Carrie Soto is Back offers its readers a warm-hearted story of the love between a father and a daughter, as well a tender journey of learning how to love yourself and open up to others too. Between the action-packed tennis matches, Carrie's emotional reckoning and the wider commentary of women having to continuously fight for recognition in male-dominated fields, Taylor Jenkins Reid has crafted another compelling novel that effortlessly draws in readers and will no doubt keep them thinking about Carrie Soto long after they turn the final page

—— Culturefly

At times, her prose is so engaging that you feel as though you are waiting on the baseline while Soto gets ready to serve an unstoppable ace

—— Independent (Ireland)

In Carrie Soto is Back, as at Flushing Meadows this and next month, there are great rivalries, millions of dollars and legacies on the line. Letting go cuts deep. But, boy, there is glamour

—— Tatler

The author has created another heroine we can't quite work out whether we like, but we're rooting for her anyway because she's fabulous

—— Woman's Weekly

Another delectable slice of escapism drama

—— Living North

Pacy, propulsive and utterly immersive, you're going to want to read this

—— Elle

Taylor has done it again . . . a brilliant and dynamic book about what it means to be an ambitious woman- for better or for worse

—— Woman

With a wonderfully complex character, a world you can't help being seduced by, and an important message about it never being too late, TJR has served up another ace

—— Heat

Frank, funny and emotional

—— Marie Claire

A fascinatingly realistic look into the world of elite sports where driven and flawed characters' private lives are just as intriguing and controversial as they are on the court

—— Business Post

This is a well-researched, exciting and genuinely tender book

—— RTÉ
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