After twenty years of being a live-in aunt Laura finds herself feeling increasingly stifled both by her obligations to the family and by living in London. When I think of witches, I seem to see all over England, all over Europe, women living and growing old, as common as blackberries, and as unregarded.

Honestly, I had no idea what I was about to read other than I knew that something very, very odd, strange and uncanny was going to happen. The point of view was old-fashioned, but the Willoweses were a conservative family and kept to old-fashioned ways. This is not a sort of compelling, page-turner read but every time I decided to sit down with it, I was completely absorbed and "bewitched.Her solitary walks put her in touch with some supernatural forces, and eventually these lead her to … well let’s just say an unconventional life choice. If this makes him sound cold or distant- he wasn’t at all, he just had such a deeply ingrained sense of this duty that meant that what he should be doing always took priority. She seemed to be standing alone in a darkening orchard, her feet in the grass, her arms stretched up to the pattern of leaves and fruit, her fingers seeking the rounded ovals of the fruit among the pointed ovals of the leaves. She is no longer Laura, but good old Aunt Lolly, someone who can be relied on to assist with the children – either that or simply ‘Caroline’s sister-in-law’, something of an appendage to the principal members of the household. Still, there she was, and Henry was right—they had been the proper people to make a home for Laura when her father died, and she was too old now to begin living by herself.

One of Warner’s better tricks is that you can’t really be sure if she’s introduced a supernatural element or not. If you sell this Satan your soul he will attack your enemies with curdled milk and wasps, he will ensure they put on their jumpers the wrong way round and inside out and that they stub their toe on the way to bed and the wrong newspapers get delivered to their house occasionally.Along the way, there are intertexts aplenty - I was especially surprised to find objects and landscapes given sentient feelings and even voices, something I associate with Katherine Mansfield. Wolf-Saunders recumbent on the beach was indeed much like a sandbag, and no more arresting to the eye. Henry, her brother, vehemently disagrees with her plans, for some selfish reasons of his own, not wanting to admit, he's not such a great business man. As she tells Henry: Nothing is impractical for a single, middle-aged woman with an income of her own.