The Magic Apple Tree stands in the garden of Moon Cottage, in the small village of Barley. Susan Hill’s book is an evocation of a year seen from that cottage, in which she and her family lived for thirteen years.

Here are the changing seasons, the sounds and smells and sights of the country, the weather and the wildlife, the growing of vegetables and the keeping of hens, the making of preserves and the establishing of a new garden in the overgrown orchard.

Here too are the people going about their everyday life in a small country community. There are the pleasures of Christmas and Easter and Harvest Festival, the village show and the summer fete, the spring fair and the Women’s Institute meetings. There is life and death, pleasure and survival, heavy snow and blazing summer heat.

The Magic Apple Tree was first published in 1982 and has become a classic of English country writing and the favourite, much-loved bedside book of so many. This edition retains John Lawrence’s evocative and true-to-life wood engravings, exactly as in the first edition.