Summer Will Show

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

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 McDonald 'Witty, eerie, tender ... her prose, in its simple, abrupt evocations, has something preternatural about it' John Updike

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 grea...

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 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