Concluding by Henry Green (Harvill £8.99 in UK)

Published in 1948, this was the seventh of Green's nine novels and, so some critics claim, his best. Green is certainly not everybody's writer, but he has always had admirers - and they include Waugh, Betjeman, Auden, all exacting critics. Like Firbank or Ivy Compton Burnett, he is an acquired taste, elliptical, mannered, rather po faced, often writing with a surface facetiousness while Gothic shadows lurk in the background. This story of the disappearance of two schoolgirls - one returns safely, the other doesn't - has the usual gallery of eccentrics and oddities who wear the mask of everyday banality two (lesbian) school mistresses, a septuagenarian who keeps pigs, a mad forester, etc. Though Betjeman called the book "enchanting", personally I find it rather sinister and surreal, in spite of the realistically gossiping schoolgirls who form the operatic chorus throughout.