The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop

As well as being a master of the macabre, Shirley Jackson was also a pitch-perfect chronicler of everyday family life. In ‘Life Among the Savages’, her caustically funny account of raising her children in a ramshackle house in Vermont, she deals with rats in the cellar, misbehaving imaginary friends, an oblivious husband and ever-encroaching domestic chaos, all described with wit, warmth and plenty of bite.