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

Rosalind Belben

To George Lupus, Master of the Quarr Hounds, the fox is a 'gentleman'. The four children all hunt, and are tremendously keen. But Dorothy Lupus dislikes the sport that has been her beloved husband's passion. When a tragedy occurs, Dorothy finds she can't bear the proximity of the kennels across the park. Roguish, Rakish, Harebell, Arcady and Argot, Striver, Decorous, Fearless, Snowmaid... Dorothy wishes never to hear their hullabaloo again. She is adamant...

Hound Music

Kristen Roupenian

She thought, brightly, This is the worst life decision I have ever made! And she marvelled at herself for a while, at the mystery of this person who’d just done this bizarre, inexplicable thing. 
 
Margot meets Robert. They exchange numbers. They text, flirt and eventually have sex – the type of sex you attempt to forget. How could one date go so wrong? 
 
Everything that takes place in Cat Person happens to countless people every day. But Cat Person is not an everyday story. In less than a week, Kristen Roupenian’s New Yorker debut became the most read and shared short story in their website’s history. This is the bad date that went viral. This is the conversation we’re all having. 
 
This gift edition contains photographs by celebrated photographer Elinor Carucci, who was commissioned by the New Yorker to capture the image that accompanied Kristen Roupenian’s Cat Person when it appeared in the magazine. 
 
You Know You Want This, Kristen Roupenian’s debut collection, will be published in February 2019.

Cat Person

Miranda France

'Intelligent, insightful, enlightening and gripping' ML Stedman, author of The Light Between Oceans 
 
When fire devastates Turney House, London’s finest stately home, the immaculate Lady Alexandra Marchant demands that everything be restored exactly as it was ‘the day before the fire’. Every charred remnant must be salvaged. Even the famous chandelier will be pieced back together into a flawless reconstruction. 
 
But is it possible, or even desirable, to resurrect the past? And why do we care so much about it? Critics say the restored Turney can never be more than an elegant fake; Lady Alexandra Marchant says Turney’s doors, its café and gift shop, must be re-opened to the paying public as soon as possible. 
 
Ros Freeman is called in as part of the effort, to Turney’s tented village of carvers, gilders, plasterers and stonemasons. Ros loves her work as a paper restorer. She considers herself an expert in uncovering the past, layer by layer, to bring out the truth. And yet in her personal life there are corners, shadows, ghosts, she fails to see. Until a discovery in Turney’s Rose Room challenges her to look again.

The Day Before the Fire

Günter Grass

Starusch, a bachelor aged forty teaching 'German and history (two inseparable subjects), undergoes protracted treatment by a dentist who uses TV to distract his patients. Gagged in his chair, the patient projects onto the screen his past and present with the fluidity and visual quality of the movies. Reality and fantasy, the actual and the repressed, overrun the screen in a mirror image of German history. Thus among other episodes we see Krings, one of Hitler's most ferocious 'fight-to-the-finish' generals, return from Russian captivity and engage in sandbox reconstructions of Germany's battles, determined to win them this time. In a casual throwaway, the author reveals his true identity -- Field Marshal Schoerner. 
 
Under the influence of local anesthesia, Starusch's imagination releases h erotic fantasies and the very violence he tries to combat in his pupils, one of them a militant Maoist. The dentist, dispensing humdrum wisdom and painkillers with godlike aloofness, objects to violence, real or imagined, advocating universal Sickcare and a diet preventive of caries as a cure-all. Meanwhile, Scherbaum, Starusch's favorite pupil, grimly prepares to burn his dachshund Max to stir u the conscience of dog- and cat-loving Berliners. 
 
Juggling mockingly with lost and found illusions, with the tensions between reformists and revolutionaries, middle age and youth, Grass has created a satirical portrait of social confusions that adds to his customary exuberance a new mastery of subtle control.

Local Anaesthetic

Antony Moore

"Since I last saw them I've not got married, or had any children, or got a promotion, or inherited a fortune; I've been doing exactly the same things I was doing last time I went." 
 
"Well tell them you've expanded." 
 
"They'll see that for themselves." 
 
Another school reunion looms for Harvey Briscow, and once again he agonises over whether to attend; as the owner of a comic shop, a devout drinker, smoker and full-time misanthropist, he's spent much of his time wondering what might have been had he chosen another path. Nothing in Harvey's life has changed since the last reunion, five years ago, or indeed the one before, and short of fabricating a fantastic change of fortune there's little to be had by going. Not until Josh, his sole employee and only true friend, suggests he may have opportunity to reclaim a very rare comic Harvey once swapped, does he galvanise himself into action. 
 
On arrival at the crowded event he meets the much-maligned Charles 'Bleeder' Odd, who has now matured into a successful businessman and appears nauseatingly content with his lot. But as Harvey makes inroads to retrieve his lost comic, he begins to suspect that all is not as it seems. The worthless item he exchanged it for must have some significance... 
 
The Swap cracks along at a tremendous pace. On one level Antony Moore's debut is a superbly plotted thriller, on another, a hilarious black comedy that will amuse anyone who has attended, or considered attending, a school reunion.

The Swap

André Brink

The Blue Door is built around one of the oldest questions in storytelling: What if ...? What if I return home one day to find, behind a familiar door, an unfamiliar world? What if the people closest to me turn out to be strangers? What if strangers start claiming a place in my life I cannot imagine? What if the memories of the most important moments in my life can no longer be trusted? What if I am not who I think I am? 
David le Roux, a teacher recently turned fulltime artist, returns to his studio one afternoon to find his whole familiar world turned upside down. The woman who opens the door and welcomes him as her husband is a complete stranger to him: beautiful and loving, but not the wife he assumes he has been married to for nine years. The children are overjoyed at his return, but he has never set eyes on them before. And when he goes back to the building he believes he lives in, it no longer exists. Has everything in his life been illusion? Or is the past real and only the present a hallucination? In a country like South Africa these questions may decide a whole life. 
Instead of living with the consequences of early choices he now discovers that behind every choice made lurks the possibility of innumerable other choices not made. 
What if, indeed ...?

The Blue Door

Patrick White

Set in Australia in the 1840s, A FRINGE OF LEAVES combines dramatic action with a finely distilled moral vision. Returning home to England from Van Diemen's land, the Bristol Maid is shipwrecked on the Queensland coast and Mrs Roxburgh is taken prisoner by a tribe of aborigines, along with the rest of the passengers and crew. In the course of her escape, she is torn by conflicting loyalties - to her dead husband, to her rescuer, to her own and to her adoptive class.

A Fringe of Leaves

Fiona Campbell

Kenji Yamada has a critical wife, a hated mother-in-law and what he thinks is a job for life until his fortieth birthday teaches him otherwise. Initially too embarassed to tell his family that he has been fired, Kenji first befriends a travelling salesman with a passion for Elvis before taking up gambling, but his wife's outrage soon brings an end to this and sends him on a roller-coaster of misadventures. 
 
Via a bizarre chain of happenstance - including being struck by lightning while wielding a golf club - Kenji somehow finds himself responsible for a weirdly believable game show... 
 
Fiona Campbell's novel is a sparkling debut with graphic-novel sharpness, humour and poignancy.

Death of a Salaryman

Raymond Williams

Matthew Price and Peter Owen both have their roots within the borders of Wales. Together they decide to build a new town, Manod, in the depopulated valleys of South Wales. Seemingly a splendid idea, and yet a world of plotting, scheming and resistance lies in store.

The Fight For Manod

Adam Ross

A hotshot young lawyer, burdened by years of guilt and resentment, comes to the aid of his irresponsible kid brother, only to realise he's a pawn in a treacherous scheme. A lonely professor, frequently regaled with outrageous tales by the office handyman, suddenly fears he's being asked to abet a murderous fugitive. A man down on his luck closes in on a mysterious job offer while doing a good turn for his fragile neighbour, but his efforts backfire in a terrifically surreal - and hilarious - manner. Four college kids goad each other on in a series of escalating dares, culminating in a result as ambiguous as it is tragic. An enterprising adolescence uses his brief career as a child actor to fulfil the crush he has on a friend's seemingly untouchable older sister. 
 
Laced throughout with glimmers of redemption and a refreshing combination of warmth and cynicism, these noirish narratives have a youthful energy that belies their hard-won wisdom, and together they showcase one of our most outstanding new writers.

Ladies and Gentlemen

Deborah Moggach

Christmas should be a joyous occasion filled with peace and love, but the looming prospect of the festive season fills Russell ‘Buffy’ Buffery with dread. Retired actor, thrice divorced, hapless father – Buffy is well versed in the complicated family Christmas, shuffling between exes and children. 
 
Except this year will be different. He has inherited a B&amp;B in rural Wales, and can finally escape the nearest and dearest, and play ‘Myne Host’ to a group of paper-hatted strangers, on escape-routes from their own clans. But when the strangers check in with their emotional baggage, and the Cab Sav begins to flow, Buffy soon realises that Christmas is never without its little complications… 
 
Join the gang at Heartbreak Hotel as they run riot, and celebrate Christmas the Buffy way.

Twin Beds

Christmas at Heartbreak Hotel

Random House presents the audiobook edition of You Know You Want This, written by Kristen Roupenian, read by Aubrey Plaza, Jayme Mattler, Molly Pope, Will Damron, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Emily Tremaine, Finn Wittrock, Amy Ryan, Olivia Taylor Dudley, Corey Brill, Jacques Royand and Kristen Roupenian. 
 
The truth was that if a woman bit a man in an office environment, there would be a strong assumption that the man had done something to deserve it . . . 
 
From the creator of Cat Person – the first short story to go viral – comes You Know You Want This, a compulsive collection about sex, dating and modern life. These are stories of women’s lives now. They also happen to be horror stories. In some, women endure the horror. In others, they inflict it. 
 
Here are women at work, at home, on dates, at the doctor’s, with their families and with their friends. Here are women grappling with desire, punishment, guilt and anger. These are stories that make you feel fascinated but repelled, scared but delighted, revolted but aroused. 
 
You Know You Want This shows why Kristen Roupenian is the most audacious new voice in American fiction. Funny, furious, sly and explicit, she takes a long, hard look at the messed-up power dynamic between men and women – and messes it up some more. 
 
(c) 2019, Kristen Roupenian (P) 2019 Penguin Random House LLC

You Know You Want This

Wesley Stace

By George is the utterly original story of a flawed but formidable family - and of two very different boys. One is an eleven-year-old schoolboy, the other a ventriloquist's dummy. With no voice of his own but plenty to say, the dummy tells his life story; from his humble beginnings in the 1930s to his rise in fame as force's favourite during the war and the horrible secret he's been made to keep. 
 
Years later, his self-possessed but vulnerable namesake finds himself packed off to boarding school, far from his mother Frankie, dynamic actress and Principal Boy; his grandma Queenie, children's party entertainer extraordinaire; and his bed-ridden but redoubtable great-grandmother. 
 
While the dummy lies dusty, silent and forgotten, his young counterpart sets out to learn about his dead grandfather's past as a world-famous ventriloquist, his magical powers and their family's curious history.

By George

Franz Kafka

The story of Karl Rossman who, after an embarrassing sexual misadventure with a servant girl, is banished to America by his parents. Expected to redeem himself in the magical land of opportunity, he instead gets swept up in a whirlwind of strange escapades and dizzying adventures.

America

David Lodge

When the university merged his Department of Linguistics with English, Professor Desmond Bates took early retirement, but he is not enjoying it. He misses the purposeful routine of the academic year, and has lost his appetite for research. 
 
His wife Winifred's late-flowering career goes from strength to strength, reducing his role to that of escort and househusband, while the rejuvenation of her appearance makes him uneasily conscious of the age gap between them. The monotony of his days is relieved only by wearisome journeys to London to check on the welfare of his eighty-nine-year-old father, an ex dance musician who stubbornly refuses to move from the house he is patently unable to live in with safety. 
 
But these discontents are nothing compared to the affliction of hearing loss, which is a constant source of domestic friction and social embarrassment. In the popular imagination, he observes, deafness is comic, as blindness is tragic, but for the deaf person himself it is no joke. It is through his deafness that Desmond inadvertently gets involved with a young woman whose wayward and unpredictable behaviour threatens to destabilise his life completely. 
 
Funny and moving by turns, Deaf Sentence is a brilliant account of one man's effort to come to terms with deafness and death, ageing and mortality, the comedy and tragedy of human lives.

Deaf Sentence

Charles Dickens

Paul Dombey is an ambitious London merchant. He pins all his hopes for the future of his shipping firm on his fragile son whilst his daughter, Florence, goes unnoticed and neglected. It is only when the firm faces ruin, and Dombey is staring at a life of desolate solitude that Florence may finally be valued. Can this heartless businessman be redeemed? Dombey and Son is a delicious and lively satire about pride and its downfall.

Dombey and Son

Matthew Baylis

M Baylis

In an attempt to escape his bizarre family and stagnation up North, tv soap-addict Alistair Strange moves to Fulham where he lands a job editing for a vanity publisher. It is an odd kind of job, but he is used to oddness: his parents are strange, his elder brother is strange his name is strange... The behaviour of his lovely but troubled flat-mate Martha, however, is odder than anything that Alistair has encountered before. Can he rescue Martha? Can he find out what his family is hiding? And is life better than tv?

Stranger Than Fulham

Lynn Coady

Guy Boucher, a fatherless teenager oppressed by the boredom and poverty of rural Nova Scotia, is dominated by his monstrous uncle, Isadore - alcoholic, capriciously violent and preternaturally vital. Isadore, who is permitted to board with Guy and his mother in exchange for the use of his red pick-up truck, is determined to make a man of Guy by forcing him to drink and play hockey. 
 
Guy dreams that access to the truck will be enough to attract a girlfriend from nearby Big Harbour. But when an awkward courtship turns sour, Guy touches off a sluggish tumult of violence fuelled by malice, booze and suffocating ennui.

The Saints Of Big Harbour

Glyn Maxwell

Britain is reeling from reports of a terrorist bomb on a film set that has killed a hundred people and, possibly, the brightest star in Hollywood, Thomas Bayne. Caught up in the middle of the national mourning is Susan Mantle - a rather hopeless London tour-guide - who is seen crying on a park bench and is taken up by the media as a symbol of the blitz spirit, appearing on the rolling news with the headline 'beautiful but crying'. 
 
She is crying, though, for other reasons: she's just been told by a clairvoyant that she is about to die. Reason and the real world are quickly relinquished as Susan is swept into a media maelstrom, becoming the baffled and increasingly unwilling star of reality TV. Buffeted by the demands of her new public, and her private terrors about her own mortality, Susan starts to lose control of everything.

The Girl Who Was Going To Die

Roddy Doyle

Two men meet for a pint – or two – in a Dublin pub. They chew the fat, set the world to rights, curse the ref, say a last farewell… In this second collection of comic dialogues Doyle’s drinkers ponder: 
- a topless Kate Middleton 
- Barack and Michelle Obama (‘fuckin’ gorgeous’) 
- David Beckham (‘Would you tattoo your kids’ names on the back of your neck?’ ‘They wouldn’t fit’) 
- Jimmy Savile (‘a gobshite’) 
- the financial crisis (again) 
- abortion (again) 
- and horsemeat in your burger… 
 
Once again, those we have lost troop through their thoughts - Lou Reed, Seamus Heaney, Reg Presley, Nelson Mandela (‘he should never have left the Four Tops’), Phil Everly, Margaret Thatcher, Shirley Temple - and they still have that unerring ability to ask the really fundamental questions like ‘Would you take penalty points for your missis?’

Two More Pints

James Hawes

Take four ne'er-do-wells: a 28-year-old ex-public schoolboy who can't bear the idea of setting down; Suzy the Black Widow, who has a deliciously flat stomach and drives like she's breathing through the carbs; Brady the Reservoir Dogs fetishist; and Chico the fat Portuguese waiter. Add some plastic guns, the IRA and a white Merc with fins and you have a plan. What plan? The plan to walk into Michael Winner's private bank and walk out with half a million quid. Fast, clever, stylish, funny and utterly compulsive, this is a first novel with everything.

A White Merc With Fins

Louis de Bernières

11-year-old Robert is asked by the beautiful Mrs. Rendall to catch the infamous 'Girt Pike' from her pond. Too poor to buy the appropriate fishing rod for the daunting task, Robert fashions his own, proving to himself, Mrs. Rendall and the rest of the village that he is capable of anything. However, it is not all happy endings . . . 
 
Part of the Storycuts series, this short story was previously published in the collection Notwithstanding.

The Girt Pike (Storycuts)

Kingsley Amis

Brought to you by Penguin. 
 
Just when Stanley Duke thinks it safe to sink into middle age, his son goes insane. As if that wasn't terrible enough, Stanley finds himself beset on all sides by women - neurotic, cantankerous, half-baked or just plain capricious. As one by one they gnaw away at his composure, Stanley wonders whether insanity is not something with which all women are intimately acquainted.

Stanley And The Women

Brought to you by Penguin. 
 
Hubert Anvil is a 10 year old boy blessed with the voice of an angel. The Church hierarchy decrees that Hubert should be turned into a castrato - an alteration that could bring Hubert fame and fortune, but would also cut him off from an adult world he is curious to discover. In a dystopian world where Martin Luther never reformed and where the Holy Office's power is absolute, where will Hubert turn if he decides to defy their wishes 
 
©Kingsley Amis 1976 (P) Penguin Audio 2020

The Alteration

Kenneth Grahame

The day that Mole abandons his spring-cleaning and sets out to enjoy the sunshine is the start of many adventures. Not only does he discover the river and the joys of messing around in boats, but he also makes lifelong friends with Rat, Badger and the eccentric and incorrigible Toad.

The Wind in the Willows

John Bennett

Sixteen-year-old Felix is bored and stressed. Stressed about his exam results. Stressed about working for that mad old bat Mrs Pretzel. Stressed about his future. Plus, he's feeling super-guilty about what just happened to Mrs P's spaniel, Vespasian. Which might be why he's just stolen his mother's cash card and booked a flight to Hong Kong. Or it might have something to do with what he just found in the permanent clearance sale at 'The House of Ming'. 
 
Sea Otters Gambolling in the Wild, Wild Surf is the story of where Felix's curiosity takes him; on a journey that challenges his preconceptions about the world, his plans for the future and his relationships with his family. 
 
Will he get home before his little sister discovers what he's up to? What'll happen to Vespasian? Will his mother ground him for the rest of his life? Will he get the passes he needs to get into University? And what's any of this got to do with otters? 
 
Whatever!

Sea Otters Gambolling In The Wild, Wild Surf

Mathias Malzieu

Edinburgh, 1874. On the coldest night the world has ever seen, Little Jack is born with a frozen heart and immediately undergoes a life-saving operation. But Dr Madeleine is no conventional medic and surgically implants a cuckoo-clock into his chest. Little Jack grows up different to other children: every day begins with a daily wind-up. At school he is bullied for his 'ticking', but Dr Madeleine reminds him he must resist strong emotion: anger is far too dangerous for his cuckoo-clock heart. So when the beautiful young street-singer, Miss Acacia, appears - pursued by Joe, the school bully - Jack is in danger of more than just falling in love... he is putting his life on the line.

The Boy with the Cuckoo-Clock Heart

J. M. Barrie

Wendy, Michael and John are sleeping when the window of their nursery blows open and lets in a very remarkable boy, Peter Pan, and his fairy, Tinker Bell. Peter soon entices the three children from their beds and out through the window to Neverland. There, they encounter mermaids, fairies, the Lost Boys, the Indian princess Tiger Lily and her tribe, and do battle with an villainous gang of pirates and their leader, the sinister Captain Hook, in a magical adventure which has enchanted generations of children and adults alike.

Peter Pan

Jimmy Rabbitte hates jazz, always has. But his wife Aiofe loves it, and Jimmy loves Aiofe. So when, in attempt to convert him, she buys him two tickets for a Keith Jarrett concert he decides to take Outspan, former member of Jimmy’s band The Commitments, who has come back into his life after a chance meeting in the cancer clinic. Jarrett is famous for being intolerant of any noise at all – a cough, a sneeze, a wheeze – from the audience, stopping playing and shaming the perpetrator. And Outspan’s diagnosis is lung cancer, it’s pretty bad, and he needs an oxygen cylinder to breathe properly. 
 
Will Outspan create havoc? Will Jimmy learn to love jazz at last?

Jimmy Jazz

Posy Simmonds

In May 1977 Posy Simmonds, an unknown young illustrator, started drawing a weekly comic strip for the Guardian. It began as a silly parody of girls' adventure stories, making satirical comments about contemporary life. The strip soon focused on three 1950s school friends in their later middle-class and nearly middle-aged lives: Wendy Weber, a former nurse married to polytechnic sociology lecturer George with a large brood of children; Jo Heep, married to whisky salesman Edmund with two rebellious teenagers; and Trish Wright, married to philandering advertising executive Stanhope and with a young baby. The strip, which was latterly untitled and usually known just as 'Posy', ran until the late 1980s. 
 
Collected here for the first time are the complete strips. Although celebrated for pinpointing the concerns of Guardian readers in the 1980s and their constant struggle to remain true to the ideals of the 1960s, they are in fact remarkably undated. They show one of Britain's favourite cartoonists, celebrated for Literary Life and Tamara Drewe, maturing into genius.

Showing results for: ‘Steve Roud’

Filters

Category

Age

Publication Date

Format

Series

Imprint

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter