The two books I've chosen to write about this month are Sylvia Townsend Warner's The Corner That Held Them , and the non-fiction Welsh Legends and Fairy Lore by D Parry-Jones, which were published only a few years apart. Apart from that, they don't have much in common except that both authors wrote about fairies - though not, to my mind, with equal success!  The Corner That Held Them , Sylvia Townsend Warner (Virago Modern Classics 2021, first published 1948) Having recently read and loved Kingdoms of Elfin (which I wrote about in January’s Month in Books ) closely followed by Of Cats and Elfins and the short novel Lolly Willowes , I’ve now turned to Sylvia Townsend Warner’s historical fiction with The Corner That Held Them . I say historical fiction, but perhaps that’s not quite an accurate description. The novel is set in the fourteenth century, but there’s hardly any history. Or, at least, what there is does not draw attention to itself as it so often does in his...

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...