This month I'm looking at two novels, one set in a very ordinary world about "a very ordinary" life, and the other in a fantasy world about far-from-ordinary people. Both Rosalind Murray's The Happy Tree and Naomi Novik's Uprooted weave their own kind of spell... The Happy Tree , Rosalind Murray (Persephone Books 2014, first published 1926) My first reaction to this novel was disappointment. It seemed like just another of those “golden summers before the First World War” books in which posh children have happy childhoods in a lovely big English house only to find sorrow, misery, grief, heart break etc etc when they grow up. All the ingredients of the idyll are there: the house, Yearsly, an eighteenth century mansion with tennis court, walled garden, rose garden, deer park, pavilion, and ponies. It is staffed by butler, cook, nurse, governess and gardeners, all long-serving and contented with their lot (“the servants never changed at Yearsly”). It is inhabit...

Here are two of the books I've enjoyed reading this month. They're both fantasies, but are very different from one another. Kingdoms of Elfin , Sylvia Townsend Warner (HandheldPress) This collection of short stories describes the Elfin kingdoms which exist side by side with our own world in the forests of Brittany, the Welsh mountains, the Netherlands and elsewhere. Warner’s fairy creatures are wonderful creations. They are untroubled by many of the things that humans obsess over: the fleetingness of life (they are long-lived though not immortal); morals (they have none); conscience (they don’t have any); the state of their souls (they don’t have souls and so have no concept of an after life). They are carelessly cruel, though they aren’t without feelings; mercurial and changeable though they cling to tradition; and though we see them through the prism of human concerns (love, vanity, ambition, hatred etc etc), they are simply, deliciously un-human. The structure of the s...