Lots of people know that Walter de la Mare was a fantastic poet, but his weird fiction is much less well known. It shouldn't be -- he was a marvelous fantasist, and The Return is a heck of a book. Arthur Lawford, recovering from a long bout with influenza, takes a fateful walk in an old cemetery one afternoon, returning a changed man who neither his wife, nor his friends, nor himself -- recognizes. . . . (Jacketless library hardcover.)

If you know Walter De La Mare's work, you probably know him as an important literary novelist and poet in the early twentieth century. But he also tried his hand at children's fiction, and "The Three Mulla-mulgars" is pretty special. It's the sort of book you want to take home and read to your kids yourself.

But it's De La Mare. You "know" it's got to have a bit of verse, don't you?

"Long -- long is Time, though books be brief:
Adventures strange -- ay, past belief --
Await the Reader's drowsy eye;
But, wearied out, he'd lay them by.

"But, if so be he'd some day hear
All that befell these brothers dear
In Tishnar's lovely Valleys -- well,
Poor pen, thou must that story tell!

"But farewell, now, you Mulgars three!
Farewell, your faithful company!
Farewell, the heart that loved unbidden --
Nod's dark-eyed, beauteous Water-midden!"

The Return by Walter de la Mare is an occult tale of possession. It is an interesting gothic psychological thriller, nebulous and dark, in the tradition of Edgar Allan Poe. Gripping and poignant tale of psychic possession concerns Arthur Lawford, who appears to have been possessed by the spirit of a long-dead French 18th-century pirate. One of de la Mare's finest occult stories, the novel also deals with domestic trauma, unrequited love and philosophical reflection. Insidiously horrific, unrelentingly disturbing...

Walter de la Mare -- famous as a fantasist and as a poet -- was a lot of things. Brilliant, well spoken, and just plain cool. But you know? In the end, his own poems speak better of this collection of poetry than we ever could. And so we let him have his say --

The Truants

Ere my heart beats too coldly and faintly
To remember sad things, yet be gay, Magic hath stolen away.

The primroses scattered by April,
The stars of the wide Milky Way,
Cannot outnumber the hosts of the children
Magic hath stolen away.

The buttercup green of the meadows,
The snow of the blossoming may,
Lovelier are not than the legions of children
Magic hath stolen away.

The waves tossing surf in the moonbeam,
The albatross lone on the spray,
Alone know the tears wept in vain for the children
Magic hath stolen away.

In vain: for at hush of the evening,
When the stars twinkle into the grey,
Seems to echo the faraway calling of children
Magic hath stolen away.

Desert Islands opens with a captivating essay on the romance of islands and castaways in literature and life, and the associations that have arisen in the imagination of readers in every generation. The essay leads on to over 200 pages of what de la Mare himself calls 'a rambling commentary', in the form of an anthology or commonplace book on every conceivable aspect of this teeming subject. There are notes, reflections and quotations from a lifetime's reading on wrecks, maroons, pirates, utopias, goats, hallucinations, exotic foods, misers, punishments, solitude , Darwin, parrots, idols, saints, hermits, maps, spices, drugs . . . and of course Daniel Defoe. Desert Islands is the perfect bedside or holiday book. It also playfully boasts a subtitle of rococo inventiveness and one of the longest you will ever read! 'A vast treasure chest, a bewildering collection . . . to dazzle and fascinate everyone who lifts the lid.' Geoffrey Grigson

'This is a book about childhood, but it is not a mere literary essay, it is a work of the widest learning, exploring the whole field of the subject ... a book rich in ideas, rich in information, rich in wisdom ...indeed, a kind of Anatomy of Childhood.' The Listener 'An enchanting book, and one that is certain of deepening affection in every house into which it finds its way.' Observer 'Only Walter de la Mare could have devised these ceremonies and been the master of them. In this conjuration of childhood he has amassed its evidence as displayed in many autobiographies, and has set against this the letters, diaries, stories and verses of these children ... His company ranges from mill hands and chimney sweeps to two queens of England; it embraces the whole gamut of the English poets; mathematicians and philosophers, though not so plentiful, are discovered to have been children once.' New Statesman

Walter de la Mare was among the leading proponents of the so-called 'Georgian' poets, a loose assembly of influential literary friends who gathered in London in the years leading up to the First World War. Concerned with a refinement of sensibility - in feeling, in expression and in particular in regard to the natural world - the Georgians tapped a popular vein that de la Mare first embraced then later distanced himself from. This engaging assembly of verse and prose, first published in 1943, is de la Mare's vivid survey on love and sensibility, and contains, in his words, 'many of the supreme lyrics in the language'.