Modern Magic: Stories of the Overbury Shops is an adult fiction that follows a group of friends who live normal lives as shopkeepers by the New Forest and in Bloomsbury. The reader discovers that they also share secret lives of magic. Their charming, amusing and intellectually rich narratives take the reader through magical experiment exploration and daring adventure – raising some surprising emotional conclusions.

The Stories of the Overbury Shops are three separate successive stories within one novel, following Pip, Geoffrey and Eleanor – each with their own narrator.

Author R. S. Holt lives in Streatham, South West London where she has worked as a museum curator and as a carer for her parents and brother. R. S. Holt also studied at the University of Durham and the Study Centre for the History of Fine and Decorative Art.