This is, by some margin, the most atmospheric book I have ever read.

It’s quite extraordinary. On one level, not very much happens. A young girl, Penelope, at the start of the 20th century goes to stay with relatives in the country to help her health (you can tell it’s set a long time ago as Penelope’s relatively poor family are living on Cheyne Walk in Chelsea!). The relatives live in an old farm house that was once part of a larger manor house.

While staying at Thackers, Penelope slips into the past, meeting the people who lived in Thackers in Elizabethan times. She slips backwards and forwards, between past and present, a traveller but never a settler. She is witness to an abortive attempt to rescue Mary, Queen of Scots, who was being held in a nearby house. And that is about it, as far as story is concerned.

But that really is the least of it. In the introduction, Alison Uttley tells how she herself, as a young girl, lived in the Derbyshire valley where the story is set and how, as that young girl, she travelled into the past.

“Many of the incidents in this story are based on my dreams, for in sleep I went through secret hidden doorways in the house wall and found myself in another century. Four times I stepped through the door and wandered in rooms which had no existence, a dream within a dream, and I talked with people who lived alongside but out of time, moving through a life parallel to my own existence. In my dreams past and present were co-existent, and I lived in the past with a knowledge of the future. I travelled into that secondary dream world, seeing all things as if brightly illuminated, walking in fields and woods dazzling in their clarity. I sat on the stone walls in the sunshine of other times, conscious of the difference, knowing intermediate events. The painted room, the vision through the windows of the house, and many another incident came to me in dreams, and I have woven them into this story.”

That is how Uttley describes it in her introduction and, reading the book, we are taken into a past dazzling in its clarity yet suffused with the logic of dream, where none of the characters that Penelope meets are surprised at her reappearances after long absence.

It is a book that cannot be adequately described, only read, but if you too would walk in those times and see everything as brightly illuminated, then read this book: no other conveys better the reality, and the strangeness, of this type of experience.