Steve Roud was Local Studies Librarian for the London Borough of Croydon and served as Honorary Librarian of the Folklore Society for over fifteen years. He has been researching British folklore for over thirty years and is the joint author of the Oxford Dictionary of English Folklore, plus other books on traditional drama and folk song, and the Penguin Guide to the Superstitions of Britain and Ireland, which won the Katharine Briggs Folklore Award in 2004. His publications include London Lore (2008) and The Lore of the Playground (2010). He also compiles the Folk Song Index and the Broadside Index, two internationally acclaimed computer databases of traditional folk and popular song. He lives in Sussex.

Steve Roud

PublicationStatus

Brand

Format

AgeRange

Series

Imprint

CategoryLabel

From conkers to marbles, from British Bulldog to tag, not forgetting 'one potato, two potato' and 'eeny, meeny, miny, mo', The Lore of the Playground looks at the games children have enjoyed, the rhymes they have chanted and the rituals and traditions they have observed over the past hundred years and more. 
 
Each generation, it emerges, has had its own favourites - hoops and tops in the 1930s, clapping games more recently. Some pastimes, such as skipping, have proved remarkably resilient, their complicated rules carefully handed down from one class to the next. Many are now the stuff of distant memory. And some traditions have proved to be strongly regional, loved by children in one part of the country, unknown to those elsewhere. All are brilliantly and meticulously recorded by Steve Roud, who has drawn on interviews with hundreds of people aged from 8 to 80 to create a fascinating picture of all our childhoods.

The Lore of the Playground

The Children's World - Then and Now

In which part of North London were wild beasts once thought to roam the sewers? 
Why did 1920s working-class Londoners wear necklaces of blue beads? 
Who was the original inspiration for the 'pearly king' costume? 
And did Spring-heeled Jack, scourge of Victorian London, ever really exist? 
 
Exploring everything from local superstitions and ghost stories to annual customs, this is an enchanting guide to the ancient legends and deep-rooted beliefs that can be found the length and breadth of the city.

London Lore

The legends and traditions of the world's most vibrant city

Amy Goodman

Amy Goodman has got the goods on the cowboys ruling the roost and dishing out the spoils of war in Washington. She serves them up here with hard facts and a sharp tongue that has won her legions of fans and a few well-placed enemies. An award-winning journalist with one of the most popular shows on American public radio, she fights daily to expose the lies, corruption and crimes of the power elite on behalf of that beleaguered breed: the unembedded citizen. 
 
The Exception to the Rulers will give you the facts you need to launch the counter-revolution: it traces the chain of contacts behind the crony contracts in Iraq and follows the money trail from payback to campaign contribution. It looks at American foreign policy around the globe and skewers a media so bent on selling the story that they forgot to check if it was true. September 11th was a windfall for Bush and his cronies -- and a disaster for just about everyone else. It's time to cut through the rhetoric and obfuscation gumming up the airwaves and expose the lies and hypocrisy that are putting the entire world at risk.

The Exception To The Rulers

Boy George

From his days as a club face alongside Philip Sallon, Marilyn and Steve Strange, through the years of global pop superstardom with Culture Club, his rebirth as a world-class DJ, as a leading light of musical theatre with the award-winning Taboo, a cutting edge photographer and a confrontational and acclaimed fashion designer, one of the many things you can say about George is: he's never stood still. 
 
It's been one hell of a trip. A decade and a half ago, George was coming to terms with the fall-out from serious drug addiction, the failure of his relationship with Jon Moss and the collapse of Culture Club.For lesser men this would have been the end but for George it became the start of a period of remarkable reinvention. 
 
Told with George's trademark biting wit, brutal honesty and sparkling insight, this book reveals the whole story, reappraising his rise to stardom and all the madness that followed.He talks about his solo singing career, his initiation into the dance music scene, and his role as the driving force behind theatrical sensation Taboo.George also discusses the achievement of the apparently impossible task of reuniting the famously fractious Culture Club. 
 
It is only now, many years on from the glittering, glossy Eighties, that George makes an insightful and often hilarious assessment of the impact of that extraordinary era.

Straight

Christopher Knight

Robert Lomas

This is the extraordinary story of Knight and Lomas's fourteen year quest to uncover the secret teachings buried beneath Roslin Chapel near Edinburgh. Their quest ends with extraordinary revelations about early human history - the origins of Christianity, of Freemasonry and of science. They show that all were charged with a belief in a secret cosmic code, linking, for example, the Exodus from Egypt,  the founding of Solomon's Temple and the Star of Bethlehem. This book reveals for the first time why there were such high expectations of a Messiah at the time of the birth of Jesus Christ. The Book of Hiram will change everything you thought you knew about both the Bible and Freemasonry.

The Book Of Hiram

Paul Tough

Why character, confidence, and curiosity are more important to your child’s success than academic results. The New York Times bestseller. For all fans of Oliver James or Steve Biddulph’s Raising Boys, Raising Girls, and The Complete Secrets of Happy Children. 
 
 
In a world where academic success can seem all-important in deciding our children’s success in adult life, Paul Tough sees things very differently. 
 
Instead of fixating on grades and exams, he argues that we, as parents, should be paying more attention to our children’s characters. 
 
Inner resilience, a sense of curiosity, the hidden power of confidence - these are the most important things we can teach our children, because it is these qualities that will enable them to live happy, fulfilled and successful lives. 
 
In this personal, thought-provoking and timely book, Paul Tough offers a clarion call to parents who are seeking to unlock their child’s true potential – and ensure they really succeed.

How Children Succeed

Aris Roussinos

A 21st century take on Dispatches, award-winning VICE News journalist Aris Roussinos tells the real stories behind life in a rebel army. 
 
The hidden truth about war is how much fun it is. 
 
However they begin, whatever their aims, wars are fought by young men. They fight in burned-out buildings and shelter under thorn trees. They eat their meagre rations, and starve for days cut off from supply lines. They smoke forty cigarettes a day and ride to war stoned, listening to Craig David. But the bombs and bullets are terrifyingly real, and the guys they’re killing aren’t always faceless enemies: sometimes they’re friends. 
 
For the last three years, award-winning journalist Aris Roussinos embedded himself with rebel groups across the world. Part travelogue from the world’s most dangerous hotspots, part eyewitness testimony to recent, bloody history, this is one man’s uncensored, unflinching account of living with the enemy.

Rebels

My Life Behind Enemy Lines with Warlords, Fanatics and Not-so-Friendly Fire

Ralph Steadman

In the spring of 1970, Ralph Steadman went to America in search of work and found more than he bargained for. In Kentucky to cover the Derby, he met a former Hells Angel called Hunter S. Thompson. Their meeting resulted in a working relationship and a friendship that lasted for more than thirty years and spanned the turbulent years of the Civil Rights movement, Nixon and Watergate, and the decay of the American Dream. 
 
Few people knew Thompson as well as Ralph Steadman did. In this unique memoir Steadman tells his story for the first time, the story - in words and pictures - of Ralph and Hunter, a great British original on a great American original, Butch and Sundance on acid...

The Joke's Over

Memories of Hunter S. Thompson

Craig Brown

Listeners to Radio Four have long reserved a very special place in the hearts for Wallace Arnold. For over four decades, he has delighted his ever-increasing band of followers with his sparkling mixture of wit and wisdom. A regular panellist on Any Questions, Stop the Week and Just a Minute, the occassional host of You and Yours, Wallace Arnold has also long been the Housewives' Favourite on Woman's Hour. 
 
In Welcome to my Worlds! Wallace Arnold takes us behind the scenes of the worlds of politics, high society, the literary life and the wireless, in all of which he continues to play a crucial role. 
 
Why was Sir Robin Day seen in the bar of the Garrick Club dressed as Widow Twankey? In what year did John Bratby paint Lord Goodman naked on an ironing board? How did Major Ronald Ferguson gain his role as the headmistress in the remake of the classic St Trinian's comedy series? In a series of marvellously erudite and entertaining vignetters, Wallace Arnold answers all these questions and many more.

Welcome To My Worlds!

The Dread Decades of Wallace Arnold

Bruce Dessau

Beyond a Joke is a celebration of comedy - one of the modern world's most dominant and compelling art forms - but it is also the story of comedy's dark side, homing in on the scandals that have surrounded some of light entertainment's biggest stars, and telling it as it is, featuring insight from one who was there at the time. 
 
While Beyond a Joke explores the extremes of this world it also addresses another question. Are comedians naturally dysfunctional, or does the stress and pressure of the job make them dysfunctional? Ruby Wax once told the author that she had builders in her house who were just as emotionally unstable as most stand-up comedians she had worked with. But they don't want to go on stage and plead with an audience to love them. 
 
Bruce Dessau is the only person who could write this book. From Russell Brand slashing his chest onstage to Jo Brand trashing a friend's car on the motorway, he has heard it all. Bruce Dessau knows where the bodies are buried.

Beyond a Joke

Inside the Dark World of Stand-up Comedy

David Nobbs

As a small boy David Nobbs survived the Second World War unscathed, until his bedroom ceiling fell on him when the last bomb to be dropped on Britain by the Germans landed near his home. It was the nearest he came to the war, but National Service would later make him one of Britain's most reluctant soldiers. It was an unforgettable and often unpleasant experience. 
 
As a struggling writer, David was catapulted into the thrilling world of satire at the BBC when he rang THAT WAS THE WEEK THAT WAS with a joke and got through to David Frost, who sent a taxi for the joke. He never looked back. His greatness as a modern comic writer was confirmed by the publication of THE FALL AND RISE OF REGINALD PERRIN, which he adapted into the immensely successful television series that has entered the fabric of British cultural life, through phrases, images and brilliant humour. 
 
A mesmerising, beautifully told tale of life in writing and comedy, I DIDN'T GET WHERE I AM TODAY is the hilarious, poignant and very personal story of David Nobbs' life, which also describes some of the most famous comedians of the last century and captures a golden age of British television.

I Didn't Get Where I Am Today

Every time someone changes sex, there's one less freak in the world 
 
Meet the Divots. They seem a happily married couple, in their cosy suburban home in a cosy suburban town. Then, one day, everything begins to change. Nick drops his bombshell. He wants to become Nicola. Alison is extremely upset, naturally. But she has more reason than most to be upset, because she has a secret too. She wants to become Alan. Nick has pulled the rug from under her. However, she's always been the supportive type and she'll wait her turn. 
 
Will Nick become Nicola? Can Alison become Alan? Can both partners in a marriage change sex and save their marriage? What effect will this have on their children, the sexy Emma and the hi-tech loner Graham? There are dramatic changes in store for them too - and for Alison's father, Bernie. 
 
In the spirit of David Nobbs' acclaimed novel Going Gently, Sex and Other Changes is a funny, touching and compassionate study of what being a man and a woman really means.

Sex And Other Changes

Richard Littlejohn

Richard Littlejohn's cast of characters &shy; including Two Jags, the Wicked Witch, Captain Hook and the Mad Mullah of the Traffic Taliban &shy; are now part of the fabric of the nation. He ridicules the country Britain has become over the past ten years - the barmy bureaucracy, the surveillance state, the petty interference in our lives, the suffocating regulations, policemen and judges who think they're part of the social services and the insanities of the 'elf 'n' safety industry, which has created such idiocies as forcing revellers celebrating Guy Fawkes Night to watch a bonfire on a big screen. 
 
'Littlejohn has been ... a vivid exponent of a great British columnar style that stretches back five centuries or more. He's a distant, bastard cousin of Thomas Nash, Daniel Defoe and Alexander Pope. Cassandra and Bernard Levin might justly buy him a pint in the Cheshire Cheese. Like or loathe him, he's the real, talented deal.' Observer

Littlejohn's Britain

Malcolm Folley

**THE ONLY DEFINITIVE ACCOUNT OF THE WORLD'S GREATEST RACE - FULL OF EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEWS WITH NIKI LAUDA, ROSS BRAWN, DAMON HILL, DAVID COULTHARD, SIR JACKIE STEWART, OLIVER PANIS AND 2016 WORLD CHAMPION NICO ROSBERG** 
 
Circuit de Monaco. Monte Carlo. The ultimate race in the Formula One calendar. 
 
When you think of Formula One, you think of Monaco. Once a year, yachts jam the harbour, celebrities fill the stands and luxury sports cars litter the streets as of thousands of people gather from across the world to watch the greatest, and one of the oldest, races in motorsport. 
 
Monaco is glamorous, prestigious and seductive. But for the drivers, it is the most demanding race of the year. The narrow streets, tight corners and sharp elevations make it the ultimate test of driving skill. It is physically draining and mentally exhausting. 
 
Proposed today, the race would not exist but it remains the jewel in the crown for every Formula One driver. There is simply no other race like it. 
 
 Win at Monaco and your name is etched in history. You will join the likes of Graham Hill, Jackie Stewart, Ayrton Senna, Alain Prost, Michael Schumacher and Lewis Hamilton. 
 
With exclusive interviews and insight from drivers and a wealth of F1 insiders, award-winning sportswriter Malcolm Folley goes behind the scenes to discover what it's really like to drive and live and breathe this iconic circuit. He reveals along the way a unique and definitive portrait of the circuit, and recreates in thrilling detail its most extraordinary weekend, when only three cars finished.

Monaco

Inside F1’s Greatest Race

Reg Kray

_______ 
 
The shocking, gripping autobiography from one of the UK's most infamous criminals and gang leaders, and one half of the legendary Kray Twins, Reggie Kray. 
 
Reggie Kray is one of Britain's most notorious criminals. Together with his brother Ronnie, he rose through the ranks of London's East End gangland to run an evil empire of vice and villainy. But, after half a lifetime behind bars, Reg wants to set the record straight. 
 
Here, in his own words, is the true story of his life as one half of a criminal double act with his brother Ronnie, the chilling career of two street-wise kids who became standard-bearers of violence - from fire-bombings to shootings and cold-blooded murder. But here too is the inner voice of a one-time mobster who learned compassion through his own struggle to come to terms with a life sentence.

Born Fighter

Brendan Behan

'I have him bitched, balloxed and bewildered, for there's a system and a science in taking the piss out of a screw and I'm a well-trained man at it.' 
 
So writes Brendan Behan, poet, writer and literary legend, of the episode that coloured his life. Arrested in Liverpool as an agitator for the IRA, he was tried and sent to reform school. He was sixteen years old. 
 
The world he entered was brutal and coldly indifferent. Conditions were primitive, and violence simmered just below the surface. Yet Brendan Behan found something more positive than hate in Borstal: friendship, solidarity and healing flashes of kindness. Extraordinarily vivid, fluent, and moving, this is a superb and unforgettable piece of writing. Borstal Boy was adapted into a film in 2000.

Borstal Boy

David Maurer

'Of all the gifters, the confidence man is the aristocrat, ' wrote David Maurer, a proposition he definitively proved in The Big Con. A professor of linguistics who specialised in underworld argot, Maurer won the trust of hundreds of swindlers. They let him in on not simply their language, but their folkwrys and the astonishingly complex and elaborate schemes whereby unsuspecting marks, hooked by their own greed and dishonesty were 'taken off' - i. e. , cheated - of thousands upon thousands of dollars. The products of amazing ingenuity, crack timing and attention to every last detail, these 'big cons', as thoroughly scripted and rehearsed as any Hollywood production, richly deserve Maurer's description as 'the most effective swindling device which man has ever invented. ' The Big Con is a treasure trove of American lingo (the write, the rag, the pay-off, ropers, shills, the cold poke and the convincer) and indeliable characters (Yellow Kid Weil, Barney the Patch, the Seldom-Seen Kid, Limehouse Chappie and Larry the Lug). First published in 1940, The Big Con makes compelling reading whilst being the most authentic and utterly authoritative study on the con artist and his game.

The Big Con

Molly Watson

When two city girls embark on an afternoon of idle window-shopping in Worcestershire and end up buying a horse, their lives swerve gloriously off course. Within weeks they have abandoned their careers in London in favour of life in the wilds of Ledbury. But their dreams of a sunny rural idyll, preferably funded by a landed local bachelor, are quick to shatter. Thrown into a hair-raising world where the horses have cocaine habits and the locals have developed their own alternative to Viagra, Molly Watson and her sister Annabel make their way through the maelstrom that is country life to hilarious effect.

In The Pink

A Rural Odyssey

Favell Lee Mortimer

Todd Pruzan

In the middle of the 1800s, Mrs Favell Lee Mortimer set out to write an ambitious guide to all the nations on Earth. There were just three problems: 
 
She had never set foot outside Shropshire. 
She was horribly misinformed about virtually every topic she turned her attention to. 
And she was prejudiced against foreigners. 
 
The result was an unintentionally hilarious masterpiece: 
'The French like being smart but are not very clean.' 
'The Japanese are very polite people - much politer than the Chinese - but very proud.' 
'The Scotch will not take much trouble to please strangers.' 
 
In The Clumsiest People in Europe, Todd Pruzan has gathered together a selection of Mrs Mortimer's finest moments, celebrating the woman who turned ignorance into an art form.

The Clumsiest People in Europe

A Bad-Tempered Guide To The World

Ben Mezrich

The New York Times bestseller and inspiration for the Oscar-winning movie, The Social Network 
 
Eduardo Saverin and Mark Zuckerberg - an awkward maths prodigy and a painfully shy computer genius - were never going to fit in at elite, polished Harvard. Yet that all changed when master-hacker Mark crashed the university's entire computer system by creating a rateable database of female students. Narrowly escaping expulsion, the two misfits refocused the site into something less controversial - 'The Facebook' - and watched as it spread like wildfire across campuses around the country, and their popularity exploded in the process. 
 
Yet amidst the dizzying levels of cash and glamour, as Silicon Valley, venture capitalists and reams of girls beckoned, the first cracks in their friendship started to appear. And what began as a simple argument spiralled into an out-and-out war. As Facebook rose to stratospheric heights by bringing people together - its very success tore two best friends apart.

The Accidental Billionaires

Sex, Money, Betrayal and the Founding of Facebook

Don Winslow

THE HIGH-OCTANE PREQUEL TO SAVAGES 
 
In Savages, Don Winslow introduced Ben and Chon, twentysomething best friends who risk everything to save the girl they both love, O. 
 
This is the story of how Ben, Chon and O became the people they are. Spanning fifty years forward from 1960s Southern California, The Kings of Cool is an intergenerational epic of drug dealers and crooked cops, friends and lovers, blood and death - and a young generation's future inextricably linked with their parents' history. 
 
A series of breakneck twists and turns puts the two generations on a collision course, culminating in a stunning showdown that will ultimately force Ben, Chon and O to choose between their real families - or each other...

The Kings of Cool

Ed Balls

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER 
 
A life in and out of politics – from the despatch box to the stage on Strictly – by one of Britain’s most influential and well-loved political figures. 
 
'Full of anecdote, insight and authenticity’ Evening Standard BOOKS OF THE YEAR 
 
'Witty, reflective and engaging' Nick Robinson 
 
'Honest and revealing' Michael Palin 
 
'Fascinating, heartfelt' Kay Burley 
 
'Insightful, funny, unexpectedly moving' Jonathan Freedland 
 
On the night of 7 May 2015, Ed Balls thought there was a chance he would wake up the next morning as the new Chancellor of the Exchequer. Instead, he woke up without a job. 
 
Twenty-one years earlier he had left a promising career in journalism to work for Labour in opposition. Moving through the ranks, from adviser to Cabinet minister and on to Shadow Chancellor, he occupied a central and influential position in and out of power during a pivotal period in British history. 
 
Speaking Out is a record of a life in politics, but also much more. It is about how power can be used for good, and the lessons to be learned when things go wrong. It is about the mechanics of Westminster, and of government. It is about facing up to your fears and misgivings, and tackling your limitations – on stages public and private. 
 
It is about the mistakes made, change delivered and personalities encountered over the course of two decades at the frontline of British politics. It is a unique window into a rarely seen world. Most importantly, it sets out what politics is about, and why it matters.

Speaking Out

Lessons in Life and Politics

Bridget Christie

Bridget Christie is a stand-up comedian, idiot and feminist. On the 30th of April 2012, a man farted in the Women’s Studies Section of a bookshop and it changed her life forever. 
 
A Book For Her details Christie’s twelve years of anonymous toil in the bowels of stand-up comedy and the sudden epiphany that made her, unbelievably, one of the most critically acclaimed British stand-up comedians this decade, drawing together the threads that link a smelly smell in the women’s studies section to the global feminist struggle. 
 
Find out how nice Peter Stringfellow’s fish tastes, how yoghurt advertising perpetuates rape myths, and how Emily Bronte used a special ladies’ pen to write Wuthering Heights. 
 
If you’re interested in comedy and feminism, then this is definitely the book for you. If you hate both then I’d probably give it a miss. 
 
“Christie is adept at turning on a sixpence between being comical, or serious, or both at once, and at pricking her own earnestness.” Telegraph 
 
‘Christie piles derision and tomfoolery upon everyday sexism, while never pretending that jokes alone will solve the problem.’ Guardian

A Book for Her

The Daily Mail's most succesful columnist delivers the coup de grace to New Labour, as the nation voted them out of office. He is not only tough on Brown and the causes of Brown, but devastatingly funny about 'Elf and Safety', 'Yuman Rights', the Surveillance Society and all the bureacratic absurdities that make modern life worse than anything George Orwell ever imagined. 
 
But, as the new introductory material reveals, the coalition of Lib Dem and Conservative also means same meat, different gravy. And already we have the first casualty of the cabinet in David Laws, another rich MP exploiting his position to claim expenses paid to his secret lover. 
 
'Littlejohn has been ... a vivid exponent of a great British columnar style that stretches back five centuries or more. He's a distant, bastard cousin of Thomas Nash, Daniel Defoe and Alexander Pope. Cassandra and Bernard Levin might justly buy him a pint in the Chesire Cheese. Like or loathe him, he's the real, talented deal.' Observer

Littlejohn's House of Fun

Thirteen Years of (Labour) Madness

Pamela Cox

Annabel Hobley

‘[Go] behind the glamorous shop fronts and the glitzy shop floors of Britain’s department stores... Here the hidden history is revealed.’ Saga Magazine 
 
Meet the shopgirls and hear their incredible true stories of life behind the counter. 
 
In this lively and colourful history, we join shopgirl Chili Bouchier on her journey from the small ladies’ department at Harrods to star of the silver screen, and experience the raw courage of John Lewis’ Miss Austin during the Blitz in the West End. We follow Margaret Bondfield as she goes undercover, fiercely championing the rights of her fellow shopgirls; and stand alongside the impoverished interwar chain store assistants who stole stockings to supplement their meagre wages. And we celebrate with the art school entrepreneurs who kick-started the boutique movement of the swinging ’60s and made the shop floor their own. 
 
Here, these wonderful tales of friendship, hardship and triumph are revealed as never before. 
 
For fans of nostalgic history and memoir, including Call the Midwife; Mollie Moran's Aprons and Silver Spoons; and The Sugar Girls

Shopgirls

True Stories of Friendship, Hardship and Triumph From Behind the Counter

The True Story of Life Behind the Counter

Bill Buford

___________________________ 
THE BESTSELLING ACCOUNT OF FOOTBALL VIOLENCE 
 
Welcome to the world of football thuggery. 
 
They have names like Bonehead, Paraffin Pete and Steamin’ Sammy. They like lager, football, the Queen, and themselves. They love England. They dislike the rest of the known universe. 
 
The beautiful game remains ugly. 
 
From following Manchster's Red Army to drinking with skinheads, acclaimed writer Bill Buford enters this alternate society and records both its savageries and its sinister allure with the social imagination of George Orwell and the raw personal engagement of Hunter S. Thompson. 
 
Among the Thugs is a terrifying, malevolently funny, supremely chilling book about the experience, and the eerie allure, of crowd violence and football culture.

Among The Thugs

David Quantick

So your husband/boyfriend/partner (delete as necessary) has just tipped over 35/40/45/50 (delete as necessary) and you can see that he's not quite as keen on Emmerdale as he once was. He's started to dress with his jeans hoiked too high like his hero Jeremy Clarkson and he's bought a home gym - the one recommended by George Clooney. Then there are those Harley Davison brochures delivered in brown envelopes. You've noticed he's started pulling in his beer gut when he's talks to his teenage secretary. And why have his grey sideburns turned that browny black? That's a sure sign of hair dye. And then you stumble into the bathroom in the morning and he's got his hands in a jar of your face cream. 
 
LADIES BEWARE! 
 
That dangerous age has arrived. It's the male menopause. The mid-life crisis. The time when suddenly you find your partner has put a whole Scalextrix track in your attic without you noticing. He's bought an electric guitar and insists on playing 'Smoke On The Water 'to the cat at all hours. It that time when no matter what you say they suddenly don't mind making a fools of themselves. They come home almost every week with a new enthusiasm. Dangerous Men don't just cook - they COOK. With truffles, that cost £210 for one the size of a wrinkled scrotum, and have to be from the right region of France. And they must be served with a side order of blowfish, because you saw that in a James Bond DVD that came free with the Mail on Sunday.

The Dangerous Book for Middle-Aged Men

A Manual for Managing Mid-Life Crisis

Emma Charles

'In many ways we were an ordinary family: mum, dad, two kids, three dogs, one rabbit, two guinea pigs. I stayed at home, studying with the Open University, and dad worked, and the kids went to private schools. We lived in a rather nice semi in a rather nice area of Edinburgh, with a rather nice Volvo in the drive, and took rather nice holidays, wearing rather nice clothes. I loved Daniel deeply and I thought - no, I was sure - he loved me deeply, too. And we both loved our kids deeply (I thought). And that was as it should be. We had it made. 
 
In some ways we weren't a completely ordinary family. There was Daniel, for one; he worked for most of the time we were married as a ship's engineer, and so he was away from home for up to four months and then home on leave for up to two. And Tamsin, our fifteen-year-old daughter, had specific learning difficulties. 
 
But I'm pretty ordinary: an unlikely heroine. I am disabled because of back problems. I'm pretty fat - I've put on a lot of weight through lack of exercise and, yes, comfort-eating! Not the stuff of movies. 
 
But I never for a moment dreamt that my family was all that extraordinary - until that day when Tamsin broke down and told me that her father, my loving husband, had been sexually abusing her.'

How Could He Do It?

Lorenzo Carcaterra

An unforgettable true story of friendship, loyalty, violence and revenge, set against the unmistakable backdrop of New York City. Now a major film starring Dustin Hoffman, Brad Pitt, Robert de Niro and Kevin Bacon. 
 
Four boys - lifelong friends who shared everything - in the confines of New York City's Hell's Kitchen, content with playing as many pranks as they can without getting caught. Until one disastrous afternoon. 
 
When a harmless scheme goes terribly wrong, the boys are left facing a year's imprisonment in the Wilkinson Home for Boys, and the beatings and abuse they find there will change their lives forever. 
 
In the years that follow, one will become a lawyer, one a reporter, and two will grow to become hitmen for-hire. But for all of them, the legacy of Wilkinson - the pain, fear and anger - still rages on within. Only revenge will erase it. 
 
One final, audacious stand against a corrupt system. If they are caught this time, the only thing to lose is their lives.

Sleepers

James Patterson

Cory Friedman was an ordinary fun-loving little boy. But one fateful March morning in 1989, the course of Cory's life changed dramatically. It started with an irresistible urge to shake his head; before long, overtaken by physical urges, tics and compulsions, his body became a volatile, explosive and unpredictable force. 
 
Cory had developed a rare combination of Tourette's syndrome, obsessive-compulsive disorder, anxiety disorder and other neurological conditions. The life he knew had been torn apart and his family were left watching him suffer. Desperate to help and hopeful of a cure, they embarked on a fifteen-year struggle which took them beyond breaking point.

Showing results for: ‘Steve Roud’

Filters

Category

Publication Date

Format

Series

Imprint

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter