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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Stella Gibbons

Brother and sister, Constance and Kenneth Fielding live in calm respectability, just out of reach of London and the Blitz. But when a series of uninvited guests converge upon them – from a Balkan exile to Ken’s old flame and the siblings’ own raffish father – the household struggles to preserve its precious peace. In this full house, in a quiet corner of suburbia, no one expects to find romance.

The Bachelor

Rosemary Tonks

WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY STEWART LEE 
 
'Should The Bloater be republished? Oh God, absolutely, it's fantastic' Stewart Lee 
 
Min works at the BBC as an audio engineer, where she is struggling to replicate the sound of a heartbeat. At home, other matters of the heart are making a mockery of life as Min knows it. 
 
Min has found herself the object of her lodger's affection. An internationally renowned opera singer she's nicknamed 'The Bloater', Min is disgusted and attracted to him in equal measure. But with a husband so invisible that she accidentally turns the lights off on him even when he's still in the room, Min can't quite bring herself to silence The Bloater's overtures. 
 
 Vain, materialistic, yet surprisingly tender, The Bloater is a sparklingly ironic comedy of manners for all flirtatious gossips who love to hate and hate to love. 
 
PRAISE FOR THE BLOATER 
 
'A wonderfully unromantic romantic comedy' Daily Telegraph 
 
'Uncommonly good' Guardian 
 
 'It is the perfect aperitif, makes you feel warm and careless and much, much happier' The Times

The Bloater

The brilliantly original rediscovered classic comedy of manners

Nevil Shute

When Johnny Pascoe attempts to rescue a sick girl from the Tasmanian outback his plane crashes leaving him dangerously injured. Ronnie Clarke, who was trained by Pascoe, endeavours to fly a doctor in to help but this proves more difficult than he imagined. As he waits overnight at Pascoe's house in order to try again the next day Clarke revisits the past of this unusual man - and reveals the shocking and tragic secrets that have influenced his life.

The Rainbow and the Rose

Jerry Chambers, a fresh-faced young pilot, mistakenly sinks a British submarine. He is reprimanded and sent to a remote posting to test an experimental new bomb, a dangerous mission far away from the girl he loves. While Jerry risks his life, his sweetheart Mona sets about clearing her lover's name...but will she be too late?

Landfall

John Bowen

In summer, and particularly when the wind blows south-west across the lawn, the sceptic tank gives out a strong stench… ‘Oh, it is a body,’ the girls say. ‘We have a body in there. No one you know. It decomposes, of course, but so slowly one quite despairs.’ 
 
In their lovely, quiet Cotswolds village, Janet and Susan are known to the villagers simply as ‘the girls’. Partners in love and work, co-proprietors of a picturesque shop, they lead an enviable, enviably settled life. 
 
But when a moment of small, surprising passion intrudes into the equilibrium of their world, the girls’ lives take a deeply unsettling turn. First comes motherhood. Then comes murder. 
 
Part-macabre comedy, part-crime thriller, part-cosy romance, John Bowen’s The Girls is a novel like none other. Told with warmth, affection and fun, yet laced with darkness and unease, 'the girls' will ensure you never look on Middle England quite so quaintly again. 
 
‘Absolutely wicked’ Armistead Maupin 
 
‘Startlingly offbeat’ Gore Vidal 
 
‘[For] people who like Myra Breckinridge as well as Miss Marple; fans of Beryl Bainbridge, Russell Greenan and Patricia Highsmith; those who feel Barbara Pym-ish on some days and Stephen King-ish on others . . . The Girls charms us as only certain tales ‘of village life’ can’ Washington Post

The Girls

Young pilot Donald Ross has little in common with the Oxford don who has employed him on an expedition to the Arctic - and still less with his beautiful but stubborn daughter, Alix.But once the three of them reach the treacherous shores of Greenland their destinies are inextricably bound by the events that unfold there.

An Old Captivity

A young English woman leaves her ageing parents to visit friends living in the Australian outback. She falls in love, both with the country and with Carl, a doctor and Czech refugee. Brought together through dramatic encounters and strange twists of fate, their relationship hangs in the balance when Jennifer is called back to England.

The Far Country

Toni Morrison

Joe Trace &ndash; in his fifties, door-to-door salesman, erstwhile devoted husband &ndash; shoots dead his eighteen-year-old lover. 
 
At the funeral, his determined, hard-working wife, Violet, who is given to stumbling into dark mental cracks, tries with a knife to disfigure the corpse. Passionate and profound, Jazz brings us back and forth in time, in a narrative assembled from the hopes, fears and realities of black urban life. 
 
'Jazz blazes with an intensity more usually found in tragic poetry of the past.... Morrison's voice transcends colour and creed and she has become one of America's outstanding post-war writers' Guardian 
 
'She wrote about what was difficult and what was necessary and in doing so she unearthed for a generation of people a kind of redemption, a kind of relief' Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, New York Times 
 
BY THE NOBEL PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR OF BELOVED 
 
**Winner of the PEN/Saul Bellow award for achievement in American fiction**

Jazz

Isaac Marion

Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet is completely reimagined in this unforgettable zombie love story. 
 
‘R’ is a zombie. He has no name, no memories, and no pulse, but he has dreams. Amongst the ruins of an abandoned city, R meets a girl. Her name is Julie and she is the opposite of everything he knows – warm and bright and very much alive, she is a blast of colour in a dreary grey landscape. For reasons he can’t understand, R chooses to save Julie instead of eating her, and a tense yet strangely tender relationship begins. 
 
This has never happened before. It breaks the rules and defies logic, but R is no longer content with life in the grave. He wants to breathe again, he wants to live, and Julie wants to help him. But their grim, rotting world won’t be changed without a fight... 
 
‘The zombie novel with a heart' Guardian 
 
SHAKESPEARE RETOLD: Time travel. Zombies. Power-hungry media moguls. This is Shakespeare as you’ve never seen him before: nine iconic plays transformed by the best novelists of our time, with covers by Michael Craig-Martin.

Warm Bodies

(The Warm Bodies Series)

Margaret Kennedy

‘She is not only a romantic but an anarchist, and she knows the ways of men and women very well indeed’ Anita Brookner 
 
 
Hugo Potts is a successful London playwright enjoying his moment of notoriety. Adored by critics and pursued by women, he’s the darling of the literary scene. But his public personae is exactly that – a personae – and he works exhaustedly day and night to portray the person the public expect him to be. One weekend he attends a party at a country house alongside the most important publishers and writers of the time. It’s an opportunity, of course, to meet interesting women. But over the course of the weekend he finds himself scorned by one, and unexpectedly profoundly understood by another, and his values and everything he’s held to be important abruptly come into question.

Return I Dare Not

Through a series of mishaps, Henry Warren, a recently divorced City financier, ends up in hospital in a Northern town ruined by the closure of its shipyard. Moved by the fate of the town's inhabitants, Warren risks his fortune and reputation to save the shipyard and restore the town to its former prosperity. In seeking to change the fate of the town, he radically changes his own.

Ruined City

During the Second World War, Peter Marshall's crew become one of the most successful bombing teams in their Oxfordshire airbase. However, when Peter falls in love with a young WAAF officer, his concentration begins to suffer and it looks as though his perfect run of missions - and his life - may be threatened.

Pastoral

Boris Pasternak

From the acclaimed translators of War and Peace and Anna Karenina, a stunning new translation of Boris Pasternak's Nobel Prize-winning masterpiece, the first since the 1958 original. 
 
Banned in the Soviet Union until 1988, Doctor Zhivago is the epic story of the life and loves of a poet-physician during the turmoil of the Russian Revolution. Taking his family from Moscow to what he hopes will be shelter in the Ural Mountains, Yuri Zhivago finds himself instead embroiled in the battle between the Whites and the Reds, and in love with the tender and beautiful nurse Lara. 
 
Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky have restored the rhythms, tone, precision, and poetry of Pasternak's original, bringing this classic of world literature gloriously to life for a new generation of readers.

Doctor Zhivago

Rafael Sabatini

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY BEN KANE 
 
Oliver Tressilian, a Cornish gentleman, is blessed with 'youth, wealth, and good digestion'. He is betrayed by his half-brother and becomes a renegade and Barbary corsair winning the title of Sakr-el-Bahr - hawk of the sea. This is the thrilling, full-blooded adventure of how a man wronged became the scourge of the Mediterranean and the terror of Christians...

The Sea-Hawk

Graham Greene

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY MONICA ALI 
 
The love affair between Maurice Bendrix and Sarah, flourishing in the turbulent times of the London Blitz, ends when she suddenly and without explanation breaks it off. After a chance meeting rekindles his love and jealousy two years later, Bendrix hires a private detective to follow Sarah, and slowly his love for her turns into an obsession.

The End of the Affair

Uprooted from war-torn London, Alda Lucie-Brown and her three daughters start a new life at Pine Cottage in rural Sussex. Unsuited to a quiet life, Alda attempts to orchestrate - with varying degrees of success - the love affairs of her neighbours. Her unwilling subjects include an Italian POW, a Communist field-hand, a battery-chicken farmer and her intelligent friend Jean.

The Matchmaker

A Victorian gentleman is forced by illness to entertain himself with the family archive, and he uncovers the Regency-era correspondence and diaries of one Miles Lufton, MP - apparently a black sheep of the family, connected with a scandal long buried. But through the pieced-together artefacts from the past, a fuller picture emerges of a man torn between two personalities - Miles, serious, studious and penniless, and 'Pronto', flirt, political mover and eternal 'extra man'. Miles longs to dispose of his disreputable alter ego, but that way lies calamity...

Troy Chimneys

Chi Zijian

'A long-time confidante of the rain and snow, I am ninety years old. The rain and snow have weathered me, and I too have weathered them' 
 
At the end of the twentieth century an old woman sits among the birch trees and reflects on the joys and tragedies that have befallen her people. A member of the Evenki tribe who wander the forests of north-eastern China, hers was a life lived in close sympathy with nature at its most beautiful and cruel. 
 
Then, in the 1930s, the intimate, secluded world of the tribe is shattered when the Japanese army invades China. The Evenki cannot avoid being pulled into the brutal conflict that marks the beginning of the end of life as they know it. 
 
'An atmospheric modern folk-tale, the saga of the Evenki clan of Inner Mongolia - nomadic reindeer herders whose traditional life alongside the Argun river endured unchanged for centuries... This is a fitting tribute to the Evenki by a writer of rare talent' Financial Times 
 
VINTAGE EARTH is a collection of novels to transform our relationship with the natural world. Each one is a work of creative activism, a blast of fresh air, a seed from which change can grow. The books in this series reconnect us to the planet we inhabit - and must protect. Discover great writing on the most urgent story of our times.

The Last Quarter of the Moon

A novel from the Vintage Earth collection

José Saramago

In early eighteenth-century Lisbon, Baltasar, a soldier who has lost his left hand in battle, falls in love with Blimunda, a young girl with visionary powers. From the day that he follows her home from the auto-da-fe where women are burned at the stake, the two are bound body and soul by love of an unassailable strength. A third party shares their supper that evening: Padre Bartolomeu Lourenco, whose fantasy is to invent a flying machine. As the Crown and the Church clash, they purse his impossible, not to mention heretical, dream of flight.

Baltasar & Blimunda

Mary Wesley

Escape to the Cornish cliffs in the dizzying heat of August 1939, where five cousins are making the most of the last summer of their youth. 
 
Oliver is just back from the Spanish Civil War and world-weary at only nineteen. Calypso is gorgeous, utterly selfish and determined to marry for money. Polly and Walter, brother and sister, play their cards close to their chests. Then there's little Sophie, who nobody loves. Soon the world will be swept into war again and the five cousins will enter a whirligig of sex, infidelity, love and loss, but for now they have one last, gaspingly hot summer at the house by the cliffs with the camomile lawn. 
 
 A beloved bestseller from an author ahead of her time, The Camomile Lawn is a waspishly witty, devil-may-care delight.

The Camomile Lawn

Read this stunning new translation of Boris Pasternak's Nobel Prize-winning masterpiece from Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, the acclaimed translators of War and Peace and Anna Karenina. 
 
Banned in the Soviet Union until 1988, Doctor Zhivago is the epic story of the life and loves of a poet-physician during the turmoil of the Russian Revolution. Taking his family from Moscow to what he hopes will be shelter in the Ural Mountains, Yuri Zhivago finds himself instead embroiled in the battle between the Whites and the Reds, and in love with the tender and beautiful nurse Lara. 
 
Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky have restored the rhythms, tone, precision, and poetry of Pasternak's original, bringing this classic of world literature gloriously to life for a new generation of readers. 
 
 The Vintage Classics Russians Series - sumptuous editions of the greatest books to come out of Russia during the most tumultuous period in its history.

Doctor Zhivago (Vintage Classic Russians Series)

W. Somerset Maugham

Looking out upon the backstreets, the suburbs and the high society haunts of Edwardian London, the delightfully witty and independent spinster Miss Ley surveys a tangled web of lives; she sympathetically observes the struggle under the pressures of convention, and the complex interplay between love and reason. Through Miss Ley's eyes we witness the brief but happy marriage of a dying poet; a woman's adulterous passion for a young rascal, and finally, an honourable man's decision to take virtue to extremes.

Merry Go Round

Yukio Mishima

In a remote fishing village in Japan, two very different young people fall in love. 
 
Shinji is a hard-working fisherman, Hatsue is the beautiful daughter of the wealthiest man in the village. She is also a diver for pearls and seaweed with the other women of the community. Shinji is entranced at the sight of Hatsue in the twilight on the beach and a relationship develops via secret notes and meetings. But when the villagers&rsquo; gossip threatens to divide them permanently, Shinji must risk his life to prove his worth. 
 
&lsquo;A work of art...altogether a joyous and lovely thing&rsquo; New York Times 
 
&lsquo;A sunny masterpiece&rsquo; Los Angeles Times

The Sound of Waves

Elizabeth Bowen

A packet of letters, found in an attic, leads young Jane into the world of love. The attic is in Montefort, a corroding country house in County Cork, which harbours a collection of people held there by ties of kinship or habit, and haunted by the memory of its former owner. During a hot and dry summer, Jane pursues her romantic imaginings, while not far off the rich, promiscuous Lady Latterly waits to play her part in Jane's awakening.

A World Of Love

Haruki Murakami

A mystery story about love, the cosmos and other fictional universes. 
 
Sumire is in love with a woman seventeen years her senior. Miu is glamorous and successful. Sumire is an aspiring writer who dresses in an oversized second-hand coat and heavy boots like a character in a Kerouac novel. 
 
Sumire spends hours on the phone talking to her best friend K about the big questions in life: what is sexual desire, and should she ever tell Miu how she feels for her? Meanwhile K wonders whether he should confess his own unrequited love for Sumire. 
 
Then, a desperate Miu calls from a small Greek island: Sumire has mysteriously vanished... 
 
WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY THE AUTHOR 
 
'Confirms Murakami as a master of his craft... Out of this world' Time Out

Sputnik Sweetheart

a deluxe gift edition of Murakami’s masterful tale of unrequited love

Jane Austen

Jane Austen takes a satirical swipe at the gothic novel in this classic book bursting with sly subversive wit. 
 
'Jane Austen is a genius, and Northanger Abbey is hugely underrated' Martin Amis 
 
Catherine Morland is a young girl with a very active imagination. Her naivety and love of sensational novels lead her to approach the fashionable social scene in Bath and her stay at nearby Northanger Abbey with preconceptions that have embarrassing and entertaining consequences. 
 
 WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY P.D. JAMES

Northanger Abbey (Vintage Classics Austen Series)

Vita Sackville-West

Edwardian era love, society and politics explored in this perfect read for Downton Abbey fans. 
 
Sebastian is young, handsome and romantic, the heir to a vast and beautiful English country estate. He is a fixed feature in the eternal round of lavish parties, intrigues and traditions at the cold, decadent heart of Edwardian high society. Everyone knows the role he must play, but Sebastian isn't sure he wants the part. Position, privilege and wealth are his, if he can resist the lure of a brave new world. 
 
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY KATE WILLIAMS

The Edwardians

'Beautifully designed... Perfect collectable gift for Austen fans and design devotees' So Darling 
 
Elinor is as prudent as her sister Marianne is impetuous. Each must learn from the other after they are they are forced by their father's death to leave their home and enter into the contests of polite society. The charms of unsuitable men and the schemes of rival ladies mean that their paths to success are thwart with disappointment but together they attempt to find a way to happiness. 
 
 WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY FRANCESCA SEGAL

Sense and Sensibility (Vintage Classics Austen Series)

INCLUDES THE NOVEL PILOTAGE 
 
Stephen Morris has just called off his engagement to the girl of his dreams because he is a penniless graduate with no prospects. He finds a job working as an aircraft mechanic, hoping to make his fortune. 
 
In Pilotage, Stephen's navigator Peter Dennison is struggling with the same problem. These two early novels draw on Nevil Shute's own experiences as a young engineer.

Stephen Morris

Dodie Smith

'This book has one of the most charismatic narrators I've ever met' J K Rowling 
 
'I write this sitting in the kitchen sink' is the first line of this timeless, witty and enchanting novel about growing up. 
 
Cassandra Mortmain lives with her bohemian and impoverished family in a crumbling castle in the middle of nowhere. Her journal records her life with her beautiful, bored sister, Rose, her fading glamorous stepmother, Topaz, her little brother Thomas and her eccentric novelist father who suffers from a financially crippling writer's block. However, all their lives are turned upside down when the American heirs to the castle arrive and Cassandra finds herself falling in love for the first time. 
 
'I know of few novels that inspire as much fierce lifelong affection in their readers' Joanna Trollope 
 
**One of the BBC's 100 Novels That Shaped Our World**

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