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

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Elliot Ackerman

TWO MISFITS. 
ONE MISSION. 
ZERO BACK-UP. 
WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG? 
 
‘You know Slow Horses – now meet the Sheepdogs . . . glorious . . . hilarious' SUNDAY TIMES 
 
'A rollicking military-adjacent adventure . . . replete with jet-setting paramilitary types, secret meetings at the highest level of government and firefights, with some rough sex and women in peril added for good measure' WASHINGTON POST 
 
Skwerl and Cheese are down on their luck after being screwed over by the US military. Skwerl used to work for the CIA’s elite paramilitary wing until he was unceremoniously fired after a raid went bad in Afghanistan. Big Cheese Aziz, a legendary Afghan pilot also formerly employed by the CIA, is stuck working the graveyard shift at the local gas station. 
 
Armed with a ton of unique and not obviously useful skills for peacetime living, both are recruited into a shadowy network of so-called ‘sheepdogs’ working jobs for an anonymous dispatcher. 
 
Their first mission? To repossess a luxury private jet stranded on a remote Ugandan airfield. Their fee: a cut of the jet’s $5 million value. But nothing about the job adds up. Their contact vanishes. Their handler’s motives are suspect. And when the women in their lives get involved – one pregnant wife and one dominatrix – the stakes skyrocket overnight. 
 
From the jungles of Kampala to the glitz of Marseille, Sheepdogs is a sly, hilarious, action-packed thriller introducing an instantly iconic spy duo. Operating in the moral grey zone between predator and prey, this is a wild ride through the absurd underworld of war and intelligence. 
 
‘Skwerl, Cheese, Dickhead Mike, the White Russian – these characters are totally addictive. I couldn’t put Sheepdogs down. A thriller and comedy in one, it’s a wild ride’ HARLAN COBEN 
 
‘Sheepdogs is the best thriller I’ve read in a long, long time. With a perfect blend of action and humor, I was hooked from the first page and couldn’t put it down until I’d finished . . . an absolute gem of a novel’ KEVIN POWERS

Sheepdogs

Amanda Eyre Ward

When Charlotte Perkins enters the 'Become a Jetsetter' contest, she dreams of reuniting her estranged children: Lee, an almost-famous actress; Cord, a handsome Manhattan venture capitalist; and Regan, a harried mother who has never got over Charlotte's gift of a Weight Watchers voucher for her birthday. 
 
But when she wins that once in a lifetime trip, all doesn't exactly go to plan . . . 
 
As long-buried secrets are revealed, and lovers new and old appear, can these four lost adults find their way back to each other? 
 
And more importantly, can they do it without killing each other? 
 
A hilarious and deliciously sun-scented novel about the courage it takes to reveal our true selves and the pleasures and perils of family.

The Jetsetters

A 2020 REESE WITHERSPOON HELLO SUNSHINE BOOK CLUB PICK

Bryony Gordon

“You’re so desperate to make everybody else happy that you’ve forgotten what makes you happy. You’ve not just forgotten it, you’ve abandoned it, on a bonfire full of all your other hopes and dreams. A bonfire you’re too scared to light in case the neighbours report you to the council.” 
 
--- 
 
Olivia Greenwood has been trying very hard to please people for a very long time. 
 
But today is going to change Olivia in a big way. A soul-crushing career disappointment, a fiery young woman with a chip on her shoulder and a cigarette in her hand, and one single blue hallucinogenic gummy all lead to a raucous night out and one hell of a hangover. And when Olivia wakes up the next morning, it seems she’s unable to please anyone but HERSELF. 
 
So who actually is Olivia Greenwood, when she’s not trying to be what everyone else wants her to be?

People Pleaser

Harriet Evans

Every family has a story to tell. Alice and Tom's begins here . . . 
 
On the eve of her sixteenth birthday, Alice Jansen collects her treasures – the keepsakes, figurines and mementoes that help her make sense of her fragile family. But the next day her heart is broken, and the final treasure, a gift from her father, is lost. Two years later, Alice answers a phone call from a stranger and runs away to New York, and tries to forget her last golden summer at the orchard on the banks of the Hudson. 
 
Tom Raven can’t understand why he keeps losing so many of the things and people that really matter to him, but he knows for certain that something important is missing from his life. One day, he remembers a forgotten letter and makes a phone call, then leaves Sevenstones, the only place that feels like home, for a strange city.

The Treasures

The Sevenstones Trilogy: Book One

Callie Coles

Sage Deverill is forced to fight for her independence, happiness and her precious son when her ex-husband turns her life upside down after a shock appearance. At home, the joy of riding brings Sage success in the new racing season. But in the midst of the highs and the lows of their personal lives and professional careers, Sage and Ralph are each pushed to the brink as their future together is thrown into question.

Silver Linings

Donna Tartt

'Everything, somehow, fit together; some sly and benevolent Providence was revealing itself by degrees and I felt myself trembling on the brink of a fabulous discovery, as though any morning it was all going to come together---my future, my past, the whole of my life---and I was going to sit up in bed like a thunderbolt and say oh! oh! oh!' 
 
Under the influence of a charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at a New England college discover a way of thought and life a world away from their banal contemporaries. But their search for the transcendent leads them down a dangerous path, beyond human constructs of morality.

The Secret History

30th anniversary edition

Alexandra McCollum

There are at least 100 things wrong with Meredith Schwarzwelder. In fact, keeping track of these things is the only way David Carew has managed to remain living with him for as long as he has. Meredith is an irredeemable eccentric who flirts with everyone in his path (#3 on the list), cries at anything (#35), makes the worst coffee in the world (#70), and talks to mice, or imagines he does (#50). 
 
It’s bad enough living with such a person on the edge of the Midnight Wood, but when magic starts to seep from the wood and a dark being emerges with a sinister plan involving Meredith, David decides that it’s time to leave the cottage, and his roommate, behind. Then Meredith’s brother gets engaged to the daughter of David’s boss, and he sees the perfect opportunity to advance his career and make his escape. 
 
With wedding bells sounding and the dangers of the Midnight Wood encroaching, David realizes there’s much more hiding beneath the surface of his roommate’s seemingly carefree charm, and that perhaps his own exasperation carries more fondness than he’d like to admit.

Into the Midnight Wood

Art Spiegelman

**In a new flexibound format with an updated afterword** 
 
This book opens with Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*!, creating vignettes of the people, events, and comics that shaped Art Spiegelman. It traces the artist's evolution from a MAD-comics obsessed boy in Rego Park, Queens, to a neurotic adult examining the effect of his parents' memories of Auschwitz on his own son. 
 
 
The second part presents a facsimile of Breakdowns, the long-sought after collection of the artist's comics of the 1970s, the book that triggers these memories. Breakdowns established the mode of formally sophisticated comics that transformed the medium, and includes the prototype of Maus, cubist experiments, an essay on humor, and the definitive genre-twisting pulp story "Ace Hole-Midget Detective." 
 
 
Pulling all this together is an illustrated essay that looks back at the sixties as the artist pushes sixty, and explains the obsessions that brought these works into being. Poignant, funny, complex, and innovative, Breakdowns alters the terms of what can be accomplished in a memoir.

Breakdowns

Richard Osman

Who's got time to think about murder when there's a wedding to plan? 
 
It’s been a quiet year for the Thursday Murder Club. Joyce is busy with table plans and first dances. Elizabeth is grieving. Ron is dealing with family troubles, and Ibrahim is still providing therapy to his favourite criminal. 
 
But when Elizabeth meets a wedding guest who fears for their life, the thrill of the chase is ignited once again. A villain wants access to an uncrackable code and will stop at nothing to get it. Plunged back into their most explosive investigation yet, can the gang solve the puzzle and a murder in time?

The Impossible Fortune

Ben Hinshaw

Surrounded by the dramatic beauty of Guernsey, a teenager discovers a secret and finds his betrayal has the power to ruin adult lives. In London, a marriage shot through with infidelity leads to a quest for revenge, resulting in a series of simultaneously comical and catastrophic events. And in California, as wildfires threaten landscapes and lives, a young veteran struggles with the trauma of war, seeking solace at a local ranch. 
 
In this extraordinary debut, a cast of characters grapple with unexpected betrayal, the loss of innocence and the lies we tell. With sharp insight, Ben Hinshaw illuminates the unnerving nature of what it means to grow up, to be a teenager playing at adulthood and an adult playing games.

Exactly What You Mean

The BBC Between the Covers Book Club Pick

Elizabeth Strout

It’s autumn in Maine, and the town lawyer Bob Burgess has become enmeshed in an unfolding murder investigation, defending a lonely, isolated man accused of killing his mother. He has also fallen into a deep and abiding friendship with the acclaimed writer, Lucy Barton, who lives nearby in a house next to the sea. Together, Lucy and Bob talk about their lives, their hopes and regrets, and what might have been. Lucy, meanwhile, befriends one of Crosby’s longest inhabitants, Olive Kitteridge, now living in a retirement community on the edge of town. They spend afternoons together in Olive’s apartment, telling each other stories. Stories about people they have known – “unrecorded lives,” Olive calls them – reanimating them, and, in the process, imbuing their lives with meaning. 
 
Brimming with empathy and pathos, TELL ME EVERYTHING is Elizabeth Strout operating at the height of her powers, illuminating the ways in which our relationships keep us afloat. As Lucy says, “Love comes in so many different forms, but it is always love.”

Tell Me Everything

Bruno Vincent

The greatest detective of all time has returned*! 
 
Meet an older, wiser and slightly more irritable Sherlock Holmes in a hilarious series of brand new mysteries as he pits his famously considerable wits against assassins, master-thieves, website cookie settings and an air fryer of truly cosmic power . . . 
 
 
*(again)

Sherlock Holmes and the Air Fryer of Doom

Ari Folman

David Polonsky

Lena Guberman

It's the middle of the night at the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, and a thunderbolt has just shattered the protective glass case in which the most famous diary in history is displayed. Magically, Anne's imaginary friend, Kitty, comes to life. 
 
When Kitty learns that Anne and her beloved sister Margot have died in the war, 
she runs away from the house and follows the sisters&rsquo; path, recounting the complete story of Anne Frank's life, family, and diary from her own unique perspective. In the present day, Kitty's adventures bring her in contact with the refugee crisis in Europe, from which she discovers the true meaning of Anne Frank's legacy.

Where Is Anne Frank

The greatest detective of all time has returned*! Meet an older, wiser and slightly more irritable Sherlock Holmes in a hilarious series of brand new mysteries as he pits his famously considerable wits against assassins, master-thieves, website cookie settings and a password of gigantic importance that is just so bloody impossible to get right . . . 
 
 
 
*(again)

Sherlock Holmes and the Mystery of the Forgotten Password

Tracy Sierra

There’s something out there in the darkness. 
By morning, bones lie in the snow, picked clean. 
 
Zach knows the moods of the mountains – his mother taught him before she was gone. His father and the other men on the ski weekend think they know better though. 
 
Drinking and boasting, they laugh in the face of the icy conditions. 
 
But Zach understands what danger looks like. Can he survive the wilderness, and all the monsters within it?

Warning Signs

Cressida Connolly

On the battlefields of the Crimea, William Gale cradles the still-warm body of his brother. William's experience of war will bring about a change in him that will reverberate through his family over the next two centuries. 
In the 1970s, William's descendants invite Stephen, a distant relation, to stay in their house in the English countryside - but their golden summer entanglements will end in a shocking fall from grace. 
 
Half a century later, a confrontation between the surviving members of the family will culminate in a terrible reckoning.

Bad Relations

Libby Page

When Tilly Nightingale receives a call telling her there’s a birthday gift from her husband waiting for her at her local bookshop, it couldn’t come as more of a shock. Partly, because she can’t remember the last time she read a book for pleasure. Mainly, because Joe died five months ago… 
 
The gift is simple – twelve carefully chosen books from Joe, one for each month, to help her turn the page on her first year without him. 
 
And so begins a reading-inspired journey that takes Tilly around the world; from bustling sidewalks in New York and the tree-lined avenues of Paris to the tranquil Tuscan countryside and the white sands of Bali. With the help of the bookshop owner, Alfie, Tilly starts to discover who she is now, after Joe. 
 
But can Tilly’s year of books show her how to love again?

This Book Made Me Think of You

Katherine Blake

You&rsquo;re Loretta Darling now, welcome to your brand-new flipping life. 
 
Dreams don&rsquo;t come true for girls like Loretta but she won&rsquo;t let that stop her. With her sights set on becoming a make-up artist to the stars, Loretta wangles her way from Lancashire to the bright lights of Golden Age Hollywood. 
 
Only it turns out that Sunset Boulevard is less about dashing fellas and chilled martinis &ndash; more sticky floors and misbehaving men. The gift of the gab can only get her so far but she refuses to go quietly. 
 
Hollywood has its secrets &hellip; and so does Loretta. 
 
For a start, that&rsquo;s not her real name, and much more than lipstick lurks inside her beauty case. 
 
After all, revenge is a dish best served with a perfectly painted smile.

The Unforgettable Loretta, Darling

Neal Stephenson

In the Metaverse - cyberspace home to avatars and software daemons - there is a new drug available: Snow Crash. A cyberdrug that reduces avatars in the digital world to dust, it also infects users in real life, leaving them in a vegetative state. 
 
This is bad news for Hiro, a freelance hacker and the Metaverse's best swordfighter, and mouthy skateboard courier Y. T. Together, investigating the Infocalypse, they trace back the roots of language itself to an ancient Sumerian priesthood and find they must race to stop a shadowy virtual villain hell-bent on world domination.

Snow Crash

Roger McGough

From 'Adultery in Isolation' to 'After You. No, After You' to 'Seaside Staycation,' a new collection from one of Britain's best-loved poets. Roger McGough brings his inimitable voice to subjects light and dark, relationships old and new, and the slippery, strange, and surreal nature of recent times. Alight with humour, wit, wisdom, and feeling, the finest poetry with the lightest touch from a poet who has captured the imagination of readers for decades.

Safety in Numbers

Khashayar J. Khabushani

Three young brothers leave Los Angeles in the dead of night for Iran, taken by their father from their mother to a country and an ancestral home they barely recognize. They return to the Valley months later, spit back into American life and changed in inexorable ways. Under the dazzling light of the California sun, our protagonist, the youngest brother, begins to piece together a childhood shattered by his father's violence, a queer adolescence marked by a shy, secret love affair with a boy he meets on the basketball court, and his ever-changing status as a Muslim in America at the turn of the new millennium. 
 
Lyrical and open-hearted, I WILL GREET THE SUN AGAIN is an unforgettable portrait of a family being torn apart, and a boy emerging from its ashes.

I Will Greet the Sun Again

Jackie Thomas-Kennedy

Susan ‘Zuzu’ Braeburn is almost forty. She has the life she’s always dreamed of – a beautiful house, a child, a successful partner. But something between her and Agnes has been off for a long time, and she can’t help but wonder ‘what if’. 
 
What if she had chosen to live with her father instead of her mother after their divorce? To pursue art over law? And, most importantly, to pursue her feelings for her male best friend from college, Cash, instead of marrying Agnes? 
 
When an unexpected loss takes her back to her hometown, over a single wintery weekend, the questions in Zuzu’s mind become too loud to ignore. She grapples with the choices she’s made and the knowledge that she doesn’t have infinite time to make changes in her life. The Other Wife speaks to unfulfilled desires and the euphoric nostalgia that’s particular to the beginning of middle age; it is heartfelt and daring in its reckoning with the quest for joy.

The Other Wife

Margarita Liberaki

'That summer we bought big straw hats. Maria's had cherries around the rim, Infanta's had forget-me-nots, and mine had poppies as red as fire. . .' 
 
Three Summers is a warm and tender tale of three sisters growing up in the countryside near Athens before the Second World War. Living in a ramshackle old house with their divorced mother are flirtatious, hot-headed Maria, beautiful but distant Infanta, and dreamy and rebellious Katerina, through whose eyes the story is mostly observed. Over three summers, the girls share and keep secrets, fall in and out of love, try to understand the strange ways of adults and decide what kind of adults they hope to become.

Three Summers

Nina Stibbe

Susan and Norma have been best friends for years, at first thrust together by force of circumstance (a job at The Pin Cushion, a haberdashery shop in 1990s Leicestershire) and then by force of character (neither being particularly inclined to make friends with anyone else). But now, thirty years later, faced with a husband seeking immortality and Norma out of reach on a wave of professional glory, Susan begins to wonder whether she has made the right choices about life, love, work, and, most importantly, friendship. 
 
Nina Stibbe's new novel is the story of the wonderful and sometimes surprising path of friendship: from its conspiratorial beginnings, along its irritating wrong turns, to its final gratifying destination.

One Day I Shall Astonish the World

Shannon Sanders

Okay, but the afterlife? It’s nothing like it looks in the movies . . . 
 
A year after the death of her father, Aubrey Lamb receives a phone call from a distant cousin. She has inherited a share of a farm, down in the sun-streaked plains of Tennessee. Seeking distraction, and a way to erase a mounting pile of debt, Aubrey makes her way South to meet a family she barely knows. 
 
Watching her arrival with great interest, and wry scrutiny, are four ghosts: Aubrey’s ancestors, the keepers (and spillers) of the farm’s secrets. As Aubrey gets to know her living family, another story unfolds in parallel: the history of the land, beginning with its purchase by her great-grandfather, one of the first Black landowners in the community, the four children set to inherit it, their bitter rivalries, and the tragedy that echoes through the decades . . . 
 
Now, as the clock ticks on a potential sale of the farm, the ghosts fear expulsion from the home they’ve made, and Aubrey must weigh the hopes and burdens of her forebears with the very real needs of her future. 
 
Dazzling and expansive, The Great Wherever is a multigenerational portrait of the American South, exploring land and legacies, race and generational wealth, and the sharp fragments of the past – how they spark and shine against the surface of our ordinary lives.

The Great Wherever

In The New Adventures of Old Sherlock, a brand-new series, Holmes and Watson return to the site of their most famous case – and discover someone is hounding the Baskervilles! 
 
'Highly amusing. Vincent revives the great detective, putting Victorian values on a collision course with modern mores' Lucien Young, author of Alice in Brexitland _____________________ 
Sherlock Holmes needs a holiday, so Dr Watson has taken him to Dartmoor, where they find a very changed Baskerville Hall. The gaunt, gothic mansion has gone: it’s now an eco-friendly, zero-waste yoga retreat. 
 
But trouble is (cold-)brewing beneath the solar panels. Someone is stirring up hate against the supposedly “woke” agenda at Baskerville and is sending anonymous death threats, in the form of a gun’s trigger and the word ‘BEWARE’! Even worse, there are reports that the slathering hell-hound on the moor has returned! 
 
Can Holmes and Watson negotiate the heightened emotions between different social media tribes, without getting themselves permanently cancelled – or even murdered*? 
 
*I mean looking at their track record, ‘yes’ is probably the answer, but it will be fun finding out! 
 _____________________ 
 
'This is a clever as parody gets. How Bruno Vincent has managed to maintain a Holmesian atmosphere with a machine gun gag rate is a mystery in itself. Wonderful stuff’ Ian Moore, bestselling author of Death and Croissants

Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Trigger Warning

Elizabeth Arnott

You've heard of the men who kill, but what about the women who loved them? 
 
It's a baking hot summer in 1960s California and three women have formed an unlikely friendship. Beverley, Elsie and Margot may look like they lead idyllic lives, but behind the false smiles and glittering pools lies the truth: their husbands are some of the country's most notorious serial killers. 
 
Amidst neighbourhood gossip and pointed fingers, the women are fighting to forge new paths for themselves. Wide-eyed Beverley is raising two young children under the long shadow of their father's crimes. Bookish Elsie is determined to make a name for herself in the patriarchal newsroom, while Hollywood party-girl Margot has a penchant for an early morning margarita - anything to quieten the shame of her ex-husband's deceit. 
 
But when a string of local killings hits the news, the women - underestimated and overlooked - are hurled into an investigation of their own. After all, who better to catch a killer than those who have shared their lives with one?

The Secret Lives of Murderers' Wives

Imani Erriu

Never make a bargain with a god. 
 
Elara is vengeful. Enzo is trapped between the realms of life and death and her enemy has vanished, taking her love’s only connection to the waking world with him. But there is a darker force at play, one that even Ariete, King of the Stars, is afraid of. 
 
On the run with enemies at every turn, Elara must enlist friends, old and new, and learn to control her almighty powers if she has any hope of saving her soulmate. Whatever happens, there is one thing she is certain of... STARS WILL FALL.

Fallen Stars

Caleb Azumah Nelson

Two young people meet at a pub in South East London. Both are Black British, both won scholarships to private schools where they struggled to belong, both are now artists - he a photographer, she a dancer - trying to make their mark in a city that by turns celebrates and rejects them. Tentatively, tenderly, they fall in love. But two people who seem destined to be together can still be torn apart by fear and violence. 
 
At once an achingly beautiful love story and a potent insight into race and masculinity, Open Water asks what it means to be a person in a world that sees you only as a Black body, to be vulnerable when you are only respected for strength, to find safety in love, only to lose it. With gorgeous, soulful intensity, Caleb Azumah Nelson has written the most essential British debut of recent years.

Open Water

Winner of the Costa First Novel Award 2021

William Boyd

Gabriel Dax is a young man haunted by the memories of a tragedy: every night, when sleep finally comes, he dreams about his childhood home in flames. His days are spent on the move as an acclaimed travel writer, capturing changing landscapes in the grip of the Cold War. When he’s offered the chance to interview a political figure, his ambition leads him unwittingly into a web of duplicities and betrayals. 
 
As Gabriel’s reluctant initiation takes hold, he is drawn deeper into the shadows. Falling under the spell of Faith Green, an enigmatic and ruthless MI6 handler, he becomes ‘her spy’, unable to resist her demands. But amid the peril, paranoia and passion consuming Gabriel’s new covert life, it will be the revelations closer to home that change the rest of his story. . .

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