With classics such as Ted Hughes's The Iron Man and award-winners including Emma Carroll's Letters from the Lighthouse, Faber Children's Books brings you the best in picture books, young reads and classics. I can hear the creak of the saddle and the clop and clink of the hoofs as we cross the bridge over the brook by Dundell Farm; there is a light burning in the farmhouse window, and the evening star glitters above a broken drift of half-luminous cloud. No book on this subject has ever quite touched me in the same way, probably because I knew these characters were based on real people. Prior to its publication, Siegfried Sassoon's reputation rested entirely on his poetry, mostly written during and about World War I.

The book as a whole is a frequently humorous work, in which fox-hunting, one of Sassoon's major interests, comes to represent the young man's innocent frame of mind in the years before war broke out. Probably there are quite a few people who will be put off reading this book by its title, but the author does not actually describe the death of any fox, and his motivation for hunting seems to be the companionship of like minded people and the opportunity for a good gallop around the countryside. Instead we just have an uneasy sense that everything we read about has somehow been lost, and this gave the detailed explanations of fox hunting an interest that they wouldn't otherwise have had for me. I even found myself carried along with Sherston’s own anxiety mixed with expectation as he ran his first great point-to-point race and was holding my breath until the very end. Graves and Sassoon did fight and saw the chaos of war and the shattering of lives and they both went off on other tangents rather than embracing modernism.Features an attractive original cream dust jacket with cobalt blue text, protected by removable clear plastic overlay. TE Lawrence once remarked that “if I were trying to export the ideal Englishman to an international exhibition, I think I’d like to choose Siegfried Sassoon for chief exhibit”. This is the first of Siegfried Sassoon’s trilogy relating to the First World War; part of my reading for the anniversary this year. But I was surprised to find myself loving this book, which was funny, beautifully observed and quite the opposite of what I was expecting.

I knew Sassoon as a war poet, of course, but this book showed me a completely new side to him – dry, witty, full of a kind of naïve and faux-pompous enthusiasm that allows for some admirable characterisations – of hens (‘the providers of that universally respected object, the egg’), for instance, or a local churchwarden (‘his impressive demeanour led us to suppose that, if he was not yet on hat-raising terms with the Almighty, he at any moment expected to be’). Slightly Foxed brings back forgotten voices through its Slightly Foxed and Plain Foxed Editions, a series of beautifully produced little pocket hardback reissues of classic memoirs, all of them absorbing and highly individual. Nice clean yellow boards with black lettering, the boards not bowing, very clean rough-cut pages as issued with minimal flecking on the front block, very clean endpapers, in an unusually nice dustjacket, no tears or marks, fractionally paled lettering to the spine, with the inner glassine wrapper present.

Not a feeling we are likely to find surprising, or all that blameworthy given his circumstances, but even then Sherston is conflicted and we are left with a final sight of the young officer standing watch across no-man’s land as a bird sings to the sunrise on Easter morning: “Standing in that dismal ditch, I could find no consolation in the thought that Christ was risen. Nellie Burton met Siegfried Sassoon through Robbie Ross, and had formerly been Ross's mother's maid.