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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Fran Littlewood

Alex, Eva and Nancy. Three grown-up sisters; each wonderful and messy in their own individual ways. And loved equally by their parents, Vivienne and Patrick. 
 
Or so they thought . . . Until on their annual family holiday, Patrick accidentally lets slip that he has a favourite daughter - causing other long-buried secrets to come to light. 
 
Set over a single week, but examining the highs and lows that define a family over the decades, The Favourite is a story about rivalries and long-held resentments, about loss and grief and blame – and, above all, about love.

The Favourite

Jenny Tinghui Zhang

Lonely college student Minnie feels invisible until she stumbles upon HOURglass: America’s new K-pop inspired boyband obsession. Soon she is memorising the lyrics to every song and staying up late to watch their livestreams, hoping that her favourite member, bad-boy Halo, will see her in the comments.On the other side of the screen, Halo is also becoming addicted to the adoration from his fans, using their love to paper over the cracks of the tragic past he is determined to keep hidden.But when Minnie is drawn to a shadowy fan community who believe they need to protect the band members from a dark conspiracy, the line between fandom and obsession begins to blur...

Superfan

Jodie Chapman

Frank and Chrissy meet a couple of days into 1970. Frank O’Hara, with his Elvis T-shirt and slicked-back hair, has escaped England for adventure out west. As soon as someone tells him about a house in the desert two hours east of LA where the walls are curved and the glass shimmers, a house where Elvis and Priscilla Presley honeymooned only a few years before, Frank tells himself: I have to see this place. 
 
When Chrissy, all blonde hair and oversized sunglasses, picks him up hitchhiking on the side of the road, it’s love at first sight. Weeks later they elope, setting out to build Mirage, an exact replica of Elvis and Priscilla’s mid-century honeymoon fantasy in a muddy English field. For the next forty years, Mirage will be home to three generations of the O’Hara family. But when your life is a sunny Californian dream raised in Britain, you start to wonder: where exactly do I belong?

California Gold

Austin Taylor

When Zoe and Jack meet in a chemistry classroom in Harvard, they couldn’t be more different: she’s the daughter of a renowned MIT professor, he’s escaping an upbringing steeped in poverty – but they are immediately drawn to one another. 
 
Neither knows it yet, but in two years’ time, they will have dropped out of college and become business partners in a billion-dollar company that promises longer life. But as they become wrapped up in a maelstrom of insatiable ambition, greed and ultimately deceit, their love for each other will be tested to its very limit…

Notes on Infinity

Lee Onhwa

When twenty-seven-year-old Yeon-hwa loses her grandmother, enigmatic proprietor of the Hwawoldang, she decides to respect her wishes by keeping the store going for at least a month, between the hours of 10pm and midnight. She has never learnt to make the traditional desserts herself, and hopes to learn more about her grandmother. 
 
On her very first day at work, she is soon interrupted by one of her grandmother’s most regular visitors, who hints that Hwawoldang is no ordinary pastry shop, and its customers not entirely alive… 
 
With each new customer at the store, Yeon-hwa is taken into their memories – but will this bring her the closure she craves, and continue her grandmother’s legacy of aiding those left in the land of the living?

A Midnight Pastry Shop Called Hwawoldang

Leodora Darlington

Natalie’s in tears in her bedroom. She’s had a huge argument with her husband. Slowly, she realises she’s already holding a knife. 
 
She’s telling herself she doesn’t want to do it. Not again. 
 
Because Natalie has an awful secret. Sometimes, on her worst nights, she blacks out. She loses control. 
 
What do you do when there’s a killer in your house, and you think it might be you?

The Exes

Jodi Picoult

On September 11, 2001, two-month-old Molly Fitzgerald’s mother goes to an appointment at the World Trade Center and never comes home. 
She is raised by her father and new stepmother, but grows up with a healthy dread of disasters. 
She now runs the local Center for Emergency Preparedness and Response, mapping out plans to save lives in disasters. She and her husband Jesse – a police polygraph expert with his own history of crisis – have found a love that is a solace in a dangerous world. 
Until the unexpected upends their marriage, leading them to question everything they thought they knew…

Hollow Bones

Fredrik Backman

The father has a story he needs to share before it's too late. As he tells his son about a courageous little girl lying in a hospital bed a few miles away, he reveals even more about himself; his past regrets, his hopes for the future. 
 
Now, on Christmas Eve, he has been given the chance to do something remarkable that could change the destiny of the little girl he hardly knows. But before he can make the deal of a lifetime, he must find out what his own life has actually been worth, and only his son can reveal the answer. 
 
With humour and compassion, Fredrik Backman's The Deal of a Lifetime reminds us that life is a fleeting gift, and our legacies rest in how we share that gift with those we love.

The Deal of a Lifetime

Nina George

Claire Cousteau is one of France’s most esteemed biologists, with a seemingly perfect family life, but she has become increasingly frustrated by her marriage and her husband’s affairs. 
 
As the Cousteaus prepare for a summer in Brittany, Claire’s son Nico asks if his new girlfriend, Julie, can join them? Julie has conundrums of her own - she is an ambitious woman, and unsure if Nico really is her match. But what the family don’t realise is that Julie and Claire have met before, in a Parisian hotel during a night that Claire thought was her secret. 
 
Beneath the Breton sun, could their surprising bond alter the course of their lives for all time?

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