Lolly Willowes (Penguin Modern Classics

A great shout of life and individuality … an act of defiance that gladdens the soul’ Guardian 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