Author of the Month

Our Author of the Month for July is the American novelist and memoirist Shirley Jackson.

She’s perhaps most famous for her 1948 short story ‘The Lottery’, first printed in the New Yorker, which generated a level of cancelled subscriptions and hate mail that baffled both author and publisher and managed to get itself banned in South Africa. Another Gothic masterpiece The Haunting of Hill House followed in 1959 and has been described by Stephen King as being ‘as nearly perfect a haunted-house tale as I have ever read’. But her range as a writer was extraordinary – her family memoirs, collected in two volumes as Life Among the Savages and Raising Demons are more reminiscent of Gerald Durrell or James Thurber than Bram Stoker, and are among the funniest, sharpest and most uplifting books you’re ever likely to read.

Start with The Lottery or The Haunting of Hill House, but if you’ve already read them, be prepared to be surprised by other books by an almost indecently talented writer.