Fairy tales are one of our earliest cultural forms, and forests one of our most ancient landscapes. Both evoke similar sensations: At times they are beautiful and magical, at others spooky and sometimes horrifying. Maitland argues that the terrain of these fairy tales is intimately connected to the mysterious secrets and silences, gifts and perils. With each chapter focusing on a different story and a different forest visit, Maitland offers a complex history of forests and how they shape the themes of fairy tales we know best. She offers a unique analysis of famous stories including "Rapunzel", "Hansel and Gretal", "Snow White", "Little Red Riding Hood", "Rumplestiltskin," and "Sleeping Beauty." Maitland uses fairy tales to explore how nature itself informs our imagination, and she guides the reader on a series of walks through northern Europe's best forests to explore both the ecological history of forests and the roots of fairy tales. In addition to the twelve modern re-tellings of these traditional fairy tales, she includes beautiful landscape photographs taken by her son as he joined her on these long walks. Beautifully written and impeccably researched, Maitland has infused new life into tales we've always thought we've known.

Here, in book form, are four lectures given by Ali Smith at Oxford University, a tidal wave of ideas in four thematically organised bursts of thought: 'On Time', 'On Form', 'On Edge' and 'On Offer and On Reflection'.

Refusing to be tied down to either fiction or the essay form, Artful is narrated by a character who is haunted—literally—by a former lover, the writer of a series of lectures about art and literature. Full of both the poignancy and humour of fiction and all the sideways insights and jaunty angles you would expect from Ali Smith's criticism, it explores form, style, life, love, death, mortality, immortality and what art and writing can mean.

In May 1977 Posy Simmonds, an unknown young illustrator, started drawing a weekly comic strip for the Guardian. It began as a silly parody of girls' adventure stories, making satirical comments about contemporary life. The strip soon focused on three 1950s school friends in their later middle-class and nearly middle-aged lives: Wendy Weber, a former nurse married to polytechnic sociology lecturer George with a large brood of children; Jo Heep, married to whisky salesman Edmund with two rebellious teenagers; and Trish Wright, married to philandering advertising executive Stanhope and with a young baby. The strip, which was latterly untitled and usually known just as 'Posy', ran until the late 1980s.

Collected here for the first time are the complete strips. Although celebrated for pinpointing the concerns of Guardian readers in the 1980s and their constant struggle to remain true to the ideals of the 1960s, they are in fact remarkably undated. They show one of Britain's favourite cartoonists, maturing into genius.

Jane Bowles wrote very little: just one perfect novel, Two Serious Ladies, a play, In the Summer House, and the dozen or so stories collected in this volume. But it was enough to establish a reputation as one of the twentieth century's most original fiction writers. From the title story in which an American woman is led to a house in a 'blue Moslem town' by a veiled woman with porcupines in her basket, to "Camp Cataract", a Colorado-based tour de force of middle-class claustrophobia and dread, Everything is Nice takes you into an edgy and exhilarating, tragicomic world. This beautifully produced volume includes all of Jane Bowles's stories, together with the fragments of two further novels, and three stories that originally formed a part of Two Serious Ladies before the book was edited by Paul Bowles. The book also includes the full text of In the Summer House, and two other short plays, A Quarreling Pair and At the Jumping Bean. Together with Two Serious Ladies, it represents Jane Bowles's complete fictional output.

Born into an affluent family, Bonnie, Tor and Ula have been left to the feckless embrace of the cook and their nanny. Their father is dead. Their glamorous mother is away entertaining the troops. When their infant brother falls ill and dies, the household disintegrates. In Tin Toys, Ula escapes with Cook, barely out of girlhood herself, and lands at the mansion of an enigmatic matriarch. In Unicorn Sisters, the three sisters are sent to a shabby English boarding school where the pupils are pitted against an anarchic gang of East End evacuees. A Bubble Garden finds the girls in Ireland, where they scrape a life in a crumbling, once-grand farmhouse, while their mother and her new husband are mired in their private traumas. A uniquely compelling and powerful coming-of-age classic.

To celebrate their 100th book, Perspehone Books has gathered together a 'varied collection' of thirty stories in one volume. "The dates of the stories range from 1909 to 1986 and there are thirty in all, ten stories by existing Persephone short story writers, ten stories that have already appeared in the Biannually and therefore will be familiar to some, and ten stories that were completely new to us and are, we hope, new to our readers." For more information see the publisher's website.

Psyche is a solitary child. Isolated—both by her exceptional beauty and her lack of interest in academic pursuits—from the hothouse of Oxford intellectualism that her family inhabits, she escapes into daydreams of love. Lost in a fantasy world peopled with fairytale princes, Rochesters and Heathcliffs, she is pitifully ill-equipped for the real thing. And her stepsister Ann stole the only boy Psyche ever really loved. So, when Psyche returns to Oxford after a failed marriage and a suicide attempt, and meets Ann's charismatic American husband Sam, the scene is set for tragedy. Years later, during a long hot summer on the west coast of Scotland, the close relationship of Psyche's teenage daughter and stepdaughter is fractured by their fight over Jonnie Mackenzie. Psyche—haunted still by guilt—fears that history will repeat itself. And so she creates for her daughter Joy an imaginary movie of the story of her life. Fragmented yet atmospheric, the movie contains all the secrets that Psyche has kept over the years—including the secret of who Joy's father really is—Populated with a range of fascinating and semi-mythical characters—Diana, who dances with bees; Tom, the blind beekeeper next door; Aphra, the therapist; the mysterious Eleutherios (a nickname for Eros, the god of love) who has been sending Psyche emails for years. The Bee Dancer is a novel about one woman's quest for love and identity. It is also a novel about fictions, and especially, the fictions we tell ourselves about love.

Girl in White is the extraordinary and moving story of Paula Modershohn Becker, who was denounced as degenerate by the Nazis after her death," told from the fictionalised perspective of her daughter Mathilde. Sue Hubbard has drawn on Becker's diaries and paintings to bring to life the artist's intense relationship with the poet Rilke and her struggle to find a balance between being a painter, wife and mother. Beautifully observed and evocative the novel is as satisfying as it is compelling.

Girl in White is a triumph of literary and artistic understanding, a tour du force: masterly, moving. "Hubbard goes where few dare go, and succeeds. You are the less for not reading it." —Fay Weldon

In his introduction to a collection of criticism on the author Elizabeth Bowen, Harold Bloom wrote, "What then has Bowen given us except nuance, bittersweet and intelligent? Much, much more." Born in 1899, Bowen became part of the famous Bloomsbury scene, and her novels have a much-deserved place in the modernist canon. In recent years, however, her work has not been as widely read or written about, and as Bloom points out, her evocative and sometimes enigmatic prose requires careful parsing. Yet in addition to providing a fertile ground for criticism, Bowen's novels are wonderfully entertaining, with rich humor, deep insight, and a tragic sense of human relationships.

Bowen's first novel, The Hotel, is a wonderful introduction to her disarming, perceptive style. Following a group of British tourists vacationing on the Italian Riviera during the 1920s, The Hotel explores the social and emotional relationships that develop among the well-heeled residents of the eponymous establishment. When the young Miss Sydney falls under the sway of an older woman, Mrs. Kerr, a sapphic affair simmers right below the surface of Bowen's writing, creating a rich story that often relies as much on what is left unsaid as what is written on the page. Bowen depicts an intense interpersonal drama with wit and suspense, while playing with and pushing the English language to its boundaries.

Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973), an Anglo-Irish novelist, essayist, and short story writer, was born in Dublin.

When the Catholic Church brings the Inquisition—also known as The Burning Time—to Ireland, Lady Alyce refuses to grant the Church power over her, her lands, or her people, and refuses to stop the practice of The Old Religion. She is declared a dangerous heretic by an ambitious emissary of the pope—who stakes his future on bringing her to heel. To lose the battle with Lady Alyce, he tells his superiors, is to lose all of Ireland.

But Lady Alyce is just as determined to fight back against the invaders' injustice, its forced imposition of a new religion, and its blatant land grab. After she outmaneuvers her rival in a court trial, there is no return: Against the penalty of being burned at the stake, she risks all to protect her people, her faith, and her beloved Ireland. Battle plans are laid, and what ensues is a vivid account of an astonishing but little-known historic figure and a gripping tale of bravery, treachery, guile, and redemption.