** Guardian Summer Reading selection: the 50 hottest new books everyone should read **** The Times: 100 best books to read for summer 2021 **Back in the 1960s a little girl of nine who was deeply in love with Narnia wrote a book of short stories. Written in spiky blue ink with various crossings-out and spelling mistakes, Katherine Langrish-s Tales of Narnia filled an old hard-cover notebook from front to back. Some of the stories were illustrated with dramatic, poster-painted scenes, and Katherine drew a map of Narnia on the inside back cover. Now a celebrated adult writer of children-s and young adult-s literature, Langrish has revisited C. S. Lewis-s Seven Chronicles of Narnia to explore what they mean to her today. In From Spare Oom to War Drobe she analyses what once enchanted her and asks whether it still has the power to do so. Hand in hand with her nine year-old self, she traces many paths through Lewis-s thick forest of allusions not only to Christianity, but to Plato, fairy ta
