Sylvia Townsend Warner has to be one of the great under-read British novelists of the twentieth century. This, my favourite of her novels, has a disaffected Victorian wife falling for her husband's charismatic mistress, and discovering revolutionary politics along the way

It's a wildly leftist novel of love, war and death; Townsend Warner chucks the lot into her simmering story, but it remains skilfully crafted. Brilliantly entertaining and far ahead of its time

With insight, malice, exquisiteness; in its wit, its instinct for style, its drawing-room urbanities, it will suggest at one time or another the work of a Rebecca West, a Virginia Woolf, an Elinor Wylie

Bruce's spooky novel is lascivious and bloody, a tale of sexual awakening and dark desires that wreathes its leafy tendrils seductively around you, then tightens them until they start to strangle.

Dark and immersive; a feast of storytelling that lingers long after the last morsel's been consumed.

This beguiling and unsettling debut had me hooked from the first page . . . a unique, strange and defiant folk horror story which lingers long in the memory.

A bewitching, beguiling, and deeply unsettling tale of one woman's strange life. It will ensnare you from page one and keep you riveted until the end.

In this storytelling masterclass, everything is inverted.

A glorious, pitch-black fairytale of a book. Lush, strange and defiant. As soon as I finished it, I went straight back to the start and read it again.

Odd and unsettling, this might not be for everyone, but we thought it was magic.

Dark and magical, one of the best books I've read this year.

A fairytale, a psychological portrait and a bleak drama.

A brilliant and sinister debut.

Beautiful, strange . . . hideously dark, delights in unsettling.

Creepy and disturbing right from the start.

A disturbing but brilliant narrative . . . a rare treat.

A great tapestry of busy-ness . . . Walter's descriptive passage are marvellous