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The Flaw in the Crystal: And Other Uncanny Stories by May Sinclair

About the Book

At that moment, in a flash that came like a shifting of her eyes, the world she looked at suffered a change... It was the same world, flat field for flat field and hill for hill; but radiant, vibrant, and, as it were, infinitely transparent.


Tales of eternal damnation, love, sexuality, death and supernatural talents form the core of May Sinclair’s essential and groundbreaking oeuvre. Literary and still thrilling today, her stories explore the strangeness at the heart of human experience and relationships, where the mundane and the everyday meets lurking, otherworldly weirdness.

Including the contents of the classic collections Uncanny Stories (1923) and The Intercessor and Other Stories (1931), this new volume also features two rare strange tales from a third, lesser-known book which explore further facets of Sinclair’s fascination with the uncanny.

May Sinclair has previously been published in the British Library Women Writers series with The Tree of Heaven (2020). Her limited work in supernatural fiction has been highly celebrated for its delicacy and precision.

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British Library Tales of the Weird

The series

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#1From the Depths #2Haunted Houses #3Glimpses of the Unknown #4Mortal Echoes #5Spirits of the Season #6The Platform Edge #7The Face in the Glass #8The Weird Tales of William Hope Hodgson #9Doorway to Dilemma: Bewildering Tales of Dark Fantasy #10Evil Roots #11Promethean Horrors #12Roarings from Further Out #13Tales of the Tattooed #14The Outcast: and Other Dark Tales by E F Benson #15A Phantom Lover #16Into the London Fog #17Weird Woods #18Queens of the Abyss #19Chill Tidings #20Dangerous Dimensions #21Heavy Weather #22Minor Hauntings #23Crawling Horror #24Cornish Horrors #25I Am Stone #26Randalls Round #27Sunless Solstice #28Shadows on the Wall #29The Ghost Slayers #30The Night Wire: and Other Tales of Weird Media #31Our Haunted Shores #32The Horned God #33Spectral Sounds #34Haunters at the Hearth #35Polar Horrors #36The Flaw in the Crystal: And Other Uncanny Stories by May Sinclair #37The Ways of Ghosts #38Holy Ghosts #39The Uncanny Gastronomic #40The Lure of Atlantis #41Dead Drunk #42The House on the Borderland #43Roads of Destiny #44Circles of Stone #45Doomed Romances #46The Undying Monster #47Fear in the Blood #48Out of the Past #49The Night Land #50Deadly Dolls #51The Human Chord #52Eerie East Anglia #53The Haunted Trail #54The Weird Tales of Dorothy K. Haynes #55The Haunted Vintage #56Summoned to the Séance #57Weird Sisters #58Julia Roseingrave #59Spores of Doom #60Medusa #61Return of the Ancients #62Phantoms of Kernow #63The Lost Stradivarius #64The Wayfarer's Weird #65The Tiger-Skin #66All the Fear of the Fair #67The Haunted Library #68Possessed #69Bird of Ill Omen #70The Black Fox #71The New Flesh #72The Luck of the Town #73Beasts with Five Fingers #74Haunted Yorkshire #75Danse Macabre #76The Black Mirror #77Fiendish Felines #78 · Coming 2026Terror Australis #79 · Coming 2026A Walk on the Weird Side #80 · Coming 2026The Unwelcome
About the author

Mike Ashley

Mike Ashley is the author and editor of more than 100 books, and is one of the foremost historians of popular fiction. His books include Adventures in The Strand (British Library, 2016), Out of This World, a brief illustrated history of science fiction (British Library, 2011), and The Age of Storytellers: British…

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