If you're new here, why not subscribe to our email updates or follow us on Facebook? You can also add us to your Google Reader. Thanks for visiting! I picked up Susan Hill’s A Change for the Better from the shelves of the Little Library, a literary free-for-all thanks to which I’ve stumbled across all manner of elderly, fusty little books. The sorts...

  In 1943 the village of Imber in the UK was evacuated for military training purposes. To this day, the village remains closed off to the public with the exception of an annual feast day during which it comes alive once more. Imber is the inspiration for the setting of The Secrets of St Dee, Victoria Routledge tells us in the book’s forward, and I...

Goodness. And I thought I had some interesting in-laws to deal with, what with the whole being asked to sleep in cemeteries thing, helping to prepare for the end of the world, nodding along with Chinese karaoke, ignoring my father-in-law’s penchant for getting around in a Ministry of Sound Jacket, and pretending that of course I love the taste of durian,...

  “One of the luckiest accidents in my wife’s life is that she happened to marry a man who was born on the 26th of September,” begins John Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos. “But for that we should both of us undoubtedly have been at home in Midwich on the night of the 26th-27th, with consequences which, I have never ceased to be...

“Alone again, Meg undid the strings of the bag that dangled from a rope belt at her waist, hidden by the long apron she wore over her plain dress. Inside the bag were her dolls – “figures”, she called them. She took them out and sat them on the edge of the gravestone. There was Dilly-Lal, with her fixed smile, Drum-a-Dum with his sticks...