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

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

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

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

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

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

Boris Pasternak

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

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)

'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)

Emily Brontë

JOIN THE OBSESSION 
'These might be the most beautiful books I've ever seen? Get them in an art gallery' 
'The marbled paper <3 I could cry' 
'Love love love this collection ' 
'I must have all of them <3 <3' 
'Our beloved classics with sprayed edges too! They are absolutely STUNNING!' 
 
A beautiful deluxe gift edition of Emily Bronte’s dark, passionate, windswept novel with foiled covers, marbled endpapers, sprayed edges, beautiful paper and finished with a silk ribbon. 
 
This is the tale of two families both joined and riven by love and hate. Cathy is a beautiful and wilful young woman torn between her soft-hearted husband and Heathcliff, the passionate and resentful man who has loved her since childhood. The power of their bond creates a maelstrom of cruelty and violence which will leave one of them dead and cast a shadow over the lives of their children. 
 
This hardback is part of VINTAGE COLLECTOR’S CLASSICS, a series of luxurious books especially crafted for collectors and fans of beautiful special editions. Sumptuous design meets the highest quality production. Discover timeless classics beautifully bound for every bookshelf.

Wuthering Heights

Bernard MacLaverty

Set in the Northern Ireland of the 1980s, Cal tells the story of a young Catholic man living in a Protestant area. For Cal, some choices are devastatingly simple: he can work in an abattoir that nauseates him or join the dole queue; he can brood on his past or plan a future with Marcella. 
 
Springing out of the fear and violence of Ulster, Cal is a haunting love story that unfolds in a land where tenderness and innocence can only flicker briefly in the dark. 
 
See also: Lies of Silence by Brian Moore

Margaret Atwood

Life Before Man is a tragicomic tale of love seeking to find its way in the wake of death from the bestselling author of The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments 
 
Elizabeth has just lost her latest lover to suicide while Nate, her husband, is working up to run off with Lesje. And Lesje? She would rather be studying dinosaurs than distracted by men. 
 
As Elizabeth, Nate and Lesje find themselves imprisoned by walls of their own construction the ghost of Elizabeth’s dead lover hangs over them. Under his shadow, and in the spell of love, their lives will collide and entangle towards a single tragicomic climax. 
 
 ‘Tender, funny, absorbing, idiosyncratic, truthful, heartening... A liberating novel’ Literary Review

Life Before Man

Haruki Murakami

The haunting, enigmatic love story that turned Murakami into a literary superstar in Japan, and is his bestselling title throughout the world 
 
Autumn 1969, and soon I would be 20. 
 
When he hears her favourite Beatles song, Toru Watanabe recalls his first love Naoko, the girlfriend of his best friend Kizuki. Immediately he is transported back almost twenty years to his student days in Tokyo, adrift in a world of uneasy friendships, casual sex, passion, loss and desire – to a time when an impetuous young woman called Midori marches into his life and he has to choose between the future and the past. 
 
‘Such is the exquisite, gossamer construction of Murakami’s writing that everything he chooses to describe trembles with symbolic possibility’ Guardian 
 
'Poignant, romantic and hopeless, it beautifully encapsulates the heartbreak and loss of faith' Sunday Times 
 
'A masterly novel' New York Times

Norwegian Wood

the classic Japanese love-story, now in a deluxe gift edition

Discover Haruki Murakami’s most beloved novel

Colette

This is Colette's famous love story about the romance between an older woman and a younger man. 
 
Léa de Lonval is a magnificent and aging courtesan facing the end of her career. She has devoted the last six years to the amorous education of the exquisitely handsome and spoilt Chéri - a playboy half her age. When an advantageous marriage is arranged for Chéri, Léa reluctantly decides their relationship must end. But neither lover can foresee how deeply they are connected, or how much they will have to give up. 
 
First published in 1920, it was instantly greeted by Marcel Proust and André Gide as a masterpiece. 
 
VINTAGE FRENCH CLASSICS - six masterpieces of French fiction in gorgeous new gift editions. 
 
'This most French of all French writers tells us how love sometimes binds and keeps a woman from breathing freely or how it may shape and support her and help her to be beautiful . . . One thinks of her as the female voice of Paris . . .' New York Times

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