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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Roberto Bolaño

War-games champion Udo Berger is finally on holiday. 
 
Travelling to the Costa Brava with his long-ignored girlfriend, Ingeborg, there they meet another vacationing German couple, Charly and Hanna, and a band of shady locals. They have fun, see the sights, relax. Then, late one night, Charly disappears without a trace. 
 
Desperate to solve the mystery, Udo refuses to leave, even after Ingeborg returns home. Increasingly frightened, the situation slips beyond his grasp and Udo suddenly realizes that the consequences of this &lsquo;game&rsquo; are much more serious than he ever imagined. 
 
TRANSLATED BY NATASHA WIMMER 
 
&lsquo;Capering, weird, rascally and short... The Third Reich is giddily funny, but it is also prickly and bizarre enough to count among Bolaño&rsquo;s first-rate efforts&rsquo; The Economist 
 
&lsquo;A mesmerizing tale: sleek, linear, easily digested, beautifully translated&hellip; Classic Bolaño&rsquo; Washington Post

The Third Reich

Franz Kafka

‘No other voice has borne truer witness to the dark of our times’ George Steiner 
 
After an embarrassing sexual misadventure with a servant girl, sixteen-year-old Karl Rossman is banished to America by his parents. Expected to redeem himself in the land of opportunity, Karl’s youthful breeziness propels him into a series of bizarre escapades which threaten to ensnare him permanently. Though dredged with humour and optimism, Kafka’s first novel bears his distinctive hallmarks, as young Karl becomes mired in an ever more unreal and oppressive system. 
 
THE CLASSIC TRANSLATION BY WILLA AND EDWIN MUIR

Amerika

Leo Tolstoy

'If you've never read it, now is the moment. This translation will show that you don't read War and Peace, you live it' The Times 
 
Tolstoy's enthralling epic depicts Russia's war with Napoleon and its effects on the lives of those caught up in the conflict. He creates some of the most vital and involving characters in literature as he follows the rise and fall of families in St Petersburg and Moscow who are linked by their personal and political relationships. His heroes are the thoughtful yet impulsive Pierre Bezukhov, his ambitious friend, Prince Andrei, and the woman who becomes indispensable to both of them, the enchanting Natasha Rostov. 
 
&lsquo;It is simply the greatest novel ever written. All human life is in it. If I were told there was time to read only a single book, this would be it&rsquo; Andrew Marr 
 
TRANSLATED BY RICHARD PEVEAR AND LARISSA VOLOKHONSKY

War and Peace

José Saramago

Watching a rented video, Tertuliano Maximo Afonso is shocked to notice that one of the actors is identical to him in every physical detail. He embarks on a secret quest to find his double and sets in motion a train of events that he cannot control. Saramago's novel explores the nature of individuality and examines the fear and insecurity that arise when our singularity comes under threat, when even a wife cannot tell the original from the imposter...

The Double

(Enemy)

Jean Cocteau

At home, Paul shares a private world with his sister Elisabeth, a world from which parents are tacitly excluded. Their room is where the Game is played, the Game being their own bizarre version of life. All that they do outside is effectively controlled by the rules of the Game: unfortunately the rules of the Game prescribe that the two children must die...

Les Enfants Terribles

Two young poets, Jan and Remo, find themselves adrift in Mexico City. 
 
Obsessed with poetry, and, above all, with science fiction, they are eager to forge a life in the literary world. But as close as these friends are, the city tugs them in opposite directions. 
 
Jan withdraws from the world, shutting himself in their shared rooftop apartment where he feverishly composes fan letters to the stars of science fiction. Meanwhile, Remo runs head-first into the future, spending his days and nights with a circle of wild young writers, seeking pleasure in the city&rsquo;s labyrinthine streets, rundown cafes, and murky bathhouses. 
 
TRANSLATED BY NATASHA WIMMER 
 
&lsquo;Fascinating... Achingly beautiful... It reads like a dispatch from beyond the grave&rsquo; New Yorker 
 
&lsquo;The Spirit of Science Fiction functions as a kind of key to the jewelled box of Bolaño&rsquo;s fictions... A cocktail of sorrow and ecstasy&rsquo; Paris Review

The Spirit of Science Fiction

Yoko Ogawa

He is a brilliant maths Professor with a peculiar problem - ever since a traumatic head injury, he has lived with only eighty minutes of short-term memory. 
 
She is an astute young Housekeeper, with a ten-year-old son, who is hired to care for him. 
 
Each morning, the Professor and the Housekeeper are introduced to one another. The Professor may not remember what he had for breakfast, but his mind is still alive with elegant mathematical equations from the past. He devises clever maths riddles - based on her shoe size or her birthday - and the numbers reveal a poetic world to both the Housekeeper and her son. 
 
With each new equation, the three lost souls forge an affection more mysterious than imaginary numbers, and a bond that runs deeper than memory. 
 
'This is one of those books written in such lucid, unpretentious language that reading it is like looking into a deep pool of clear water...Dive into Yoko Ogawa's world and you find yourself tugged by forces more felt than seen' New York Times 
 
VINTAGE JAPANESE CLASSICS - five masterpieces of Japanese fiction in gorgeous new gift editions.

The Housekeeper and the Professor (Vintage Classics Japanese Series)

Alexandre Dumas

All for one, and one for all! 
 
The young D'Artagnan and the legendary musketeers Athos, Porthos and Aramis are 'the inseparables' - ready to sacrifice everything in a duel or game of dice in order to defend their honour or that of the King and Queen of France. Handsome and hot-tempered, they dive into raging battles or back-street conspiracies with gusto, especially if by their daring deeds they can thwart the wicked devices of their arch-enemy, Cardinal Richelieu, and his mysterious accomplice, Milady de Winter. 
 
'Pure swashbuckling pleasure' Daily Telegraph 
 
TRANSLATED BY WILL HOBSON 
 
VINTAGE FRENCH CLASSICS - six masterpieces of French fiction in gorgeous new gift editions.

The Three Musketeers

Vintage Classics French Series

Josef Skvorecky

THE ENGINEER OF HUMAN SOULS spins its own story from the torn entrails of Central Europe. yet what emerges is comedy - clack, grimacing and explosively funny, as peculiarly middle European as the despairing wit of prague's own Franz Kafka' Time

The Engineer Of Human Souls

An Entertainment on the Old Themes of Life,Women,Fate,Dreams,the Working Class, Secret Agents,Love and Death

Natsume Soseki

Discover the original Japanese Cat classic, now in a vibrant new translation by Nick Bradley, author of The Cat and the City. 
 
'I am a Cat. But I still don't have a name...' 
 
Once a stray kitten, I Am a Cat’s narrator finds himself adopted by a local scholar and thrown headfirst into the absurd upper middle-class world of Meiji-era Japan. Now a noble but somewhat world-weary observer, he has ample opportunity to dissect the strange ways and convoluted conversations of the human race. 
 
First published at the turn of the 20th century, and regarded as one of Japan’s most iconic classics, I Am a Cat is a captivating exploration of identity, society, and the often bewildering nature of the human condition—all seen through the eyes of a very special, uncompromising cat. 
 
‘A biting satire of Meiji-era Japan' Jessie Burton, Guardian 
 
‘Soseki is the representative modern Japanese novelist, a figure of truly national stature’ Haruki Murakami

I Am a Cat

Volume One

Dropped from the Olympic figure skating team, Nuria Martí&rsquo;s fate pivots her into a world of corruption, jealousy &ndash; and revenge. 
 
Cushioning her fall from grace, a besotted admirer builds a secret ice rink for her in the ruins of an old masion on the outskirts of their seaside town. What he doesn&rsquo;t tell her is he paid for it using public funds. Such deceit is not without repercussions, and the skating rink soon becomes a crime scene. 
 
Narrated by a corrupt and pompous civil servant, a beleaguered romantic poet, and a duplicitous civil servant, The Skating Rink is a darkly atmospheric tale of murder and its motives. 
 
TRANSLATED BY CHRIS ANDREWS 
 
'A work of intense and unrealized longing' The New York Times 
 
&lsquo;Bolaño makes you feel changed for having read him; he adjusts your angle of view on the world&rsquo; Guardian

The Skating Rink

Alberto Ruiz-Tagle was once the quiet, unknowable, unpromising member of Chile&rsquo;s young poetry scene. 
 
But the military coup of 1973 sees Alberto reborn as Chile&rsquo;s leading celebrity poet, Carlos Wieder. Known for his daring sky poems, penned in smoke high above the cities, Weider&rsquo;s dazzling trajectory is a cause for astonishment and speculation amongst his old poetry friends. Where did this talent suddenly spring from? And, how is it connected to the disappearance of the beautiful Garmendia twins? 
 
Told from across the years in exile in Europe, the narrator&rsquo;s attempts to trace the fate of his old circle will lead him to one last confrontation with the brutality of their generation. 
 
TRANSLATED BY CHRIS ANDREWS 
 
&lsquo;Roberto Bolaño's universe &ndash; huge, interconnected, polyphonic &ndash; is formed from the collision of a wicked sense of humour and a vast and white-hot moral fire... His oeuvre is among the great, blistering literary achievements of the twentieth century&rsquo; Lauren Groff 
 
&lsquo;For stunning wit, brutal honesty, loving humanity and a heart that bleeds into the simplest of words, no other writer ever came close&rsquo; Marlon James

Distant Star

Julio Cortázar

In a fog-drenched Buenos Aires, Juan and Clara should be preparing for their final exam. Instead, they roam the city with friends, drifting through cafés, encountering strange happenings, and unravelling life’s mysteries. All the while, they are shadowed by the mysterious Abel. 
 
Darkly funny and steeped in ambiguity, Final Exam is Julio Cortázar’s haunting allegory of a world on the brink—his melancholic, defiant farewell to an Argentina he would soon leave behind forever.

Final Exam

Vasily Grossman

Life and Fate is an epic tale of twentieth-century Russia told through the fate of a single family, the Shaposhnikovs, from the Sunday Times bestselling author of Stalingrad. 
 
As the battle of Stalingrad looms, Grossman's characters must work out their destinies in a world torn by ideological tyranny and war. 
 
Completed in 1960 and then confiscated by the KGB, this sweeping panorama of Soviet Society remained unpublished until it was smuggled into the West in 1980, where it was hailed as a masterpiece. 
 
'One of the finest Russian novels of the 20th century' Daily Telegraph 
 
'Compelling... Grossman's portrait is timelessly relevant... Life and Fate is worth all the audience it can find' The Times 
 
VINTAGE CLASSICS RUSSIAN SERIES - sumptuous editions of the greatest books to come out of Russia during the most tumultuous period in its history.

Life and Fate (Vintage Classic Russians Series)

The great Russian 20th-century novel from the Sunday Times bestselling author of Stalingrad. 
 
Life and Fate is an epic tale of a country told through the fate of a single family, the Shaposhnikovs. As the battle of Stalingrad looms, Grossman's characters must work out their destinies in a world torn by ideological tyranny and war. 
 
Completed in 1960 and then confiscated by the KGB, this sweeping panorama of Soviet Society remained unpublished until it was smuggled into the West in 1980, where it was hailed as a masterpiece. 
 
"Compelling... Grossman's portrait is timelessly relevant... Life and Fate is worth all the audience it can find" The Times

Life and Fate

Bohumil Hrabal

This ebullient, gallivanting novel encapsulates the world vision of the Czech Republic's best-loved author in one tumbling, breathtaking sentence. Saints and sinners, emperors and embezzlers, barmaids and balalaikas all play their part in the bawdy reminiscences of Hrabal's cobbler as he charms an audience of young beauties.

Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age

Andrey Kurkov

All that stands between one man and murder by the mafia is a penguin.Viktor writes obituaries for a newspaper in Kyiv; the only creature he trusts is his pet penguin, Misha. But when his ‘subjects’ start dying while their tributes sit in his drawer, Viktor realises he’s writing death notices to order.Bleakly funny and quietly tragic, Death and the Penguin captures life in a collapsing world where conscience and corruption blur. Kurkov’s understated prose turns absurdity into menace - a masterpiece of Eastern European noir with feathers and frostbite.‘A tragicomic masterpiece’ Daily Telegraph‘A black comedy of rare distinction’ Spectator

Death and the Penguin

A BBC Two Between the Covers Pick

Haruki Murakami

Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973 are Haruki Murakami’s two first novel - here they are together in one edition. 
 
Now I think it’s time to tell my story. 
 
Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973 are Haruki Murakami’s two first novels. Home from college on his summer break, the narrator spends his time drinking beer and smoking with his friend nicknamed the Rat, listening to the radio, thinking about writing and pursuing a relationship with a girl with nine fingers. Three years later he has moved to Tokyo to work as a translator and live with indistinguishable twin girls. But the Rat has remained behind. Haunted by memories of the past, the narrator embarks upon a quest to find the exact model of pinball machine he and the Rat had enjoyed playing years earlier: the three-flipper Spaceship. 
 
‘Quintessential Murakami…an excellent introduction to a writer who has since become one of the most influential novelists of his generation’ Guardian 
 
‘Murakami’s way of making emotionally resonant images and symbols bump around on the page, and in one’s mind, remains fresh’ Evening Standard 
 
'I was so taken with its atmosphere that I read and reread it' Patti Smith 
 
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY THE AUTHOR

Wind/ Pinball

Two Novels

Manuel Puig

Valentin and Molina seemingly share little other than a cell in this queer classic ahead of its time. 
 
'Dazzling... a triumph' Observer 
 
Sometimes they talk all night long. In the still darkness of their Buenos Aires prison cell, Molina re-weaves the glittering and fragile stories of the film he loves, and the cynical Valentin listens. Valentin believes in the just cause that makes all suffering bearable; Molina believes in the magic of love that makes all else endurable. 
 
Though they seemingly share little other than a cell, the two form a bond so intimate - and a relationship so profoundly affecting - that only the other could understand. 
 
'A visionary work that breathed life into certain dimensions of human possibility long before society at large was prepared to imagine them.' Carolina de Robertis, Los Angeles Review of Books

Kiss of the Spider Woman

The Queer Classic Everyone Should Read

Junichiro Tanizaki

A seductive psychological thriller about obsession, jealousy and deceit - and a Japanese queer classic. Sonoko must tell her story. Listen and decide for yourself. 
 
Sonoko Kakiuchi is a cultured Osaka lady in an uninspiring marriage. When she decides to take an art class in town she meets the extraordinary Mitsuko, a woman as beautiful and charismatic as she is cunning. They begin a passionate affair but as Sonoko’s infatuation with Mitsuko deepens, she finds herself sinking ever-further into a quicksand of sex, humiliation and deceit. 
 
‘A riveting tale of malevolent corruption fatally masked by a terrible and deceptive beauty’ Kirkus Reviews 
 
‘Classic Tanizaki…exuberant storytelling within a multi-layered narrative of sexual obsession’ Japan Times 
 
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY KRISTEN ROUPENIAN

Quicksand

Three fiercely original tales. An unexpected treasure from the vault of a revolutionary talent. 
 
Roberto Bolaño's boundless gift for shaping the chaos of reality into fiction is unmistakable across these three novellas. In &lsquo;Cowboy Graves,&rsquo; Arturo Belano &ndash; Bolaño's alter ego &ndash; returns to Chile after the coup to fight with his comrades for socialism. &lsquo;French Comedy of Horrors&rsquo; finds a seventeen-year-old recruited into a secret society of artists in the sewers of Paris. And in &lsquo;Fatherland,&rsquo; a young poet reckons with the fascist overthrow of his country, as the woman he is obsessed with disappears in the ensuing violence. 
 
TRANSLATED BY NATASHA WIMMER 
 
&lsquo;His work is as vital, thrilling and life-enhancing as anything in modern fiction&rsquo; Sunday Times 
 
&lsquo;Fascinating... A rare opportunity for the reader to witness the creation of a seemingly inexhaustible body of work&rsquo; El Pais

Cowboy Graves

A subtle and insightful story about boredom, passion, curiosity and memory from the Nobel Prize-winner José Saramago 
 
Senhor José is a lonely civil servant who spends his days labouring in the labyrinthine stacks of Lisbon's central registry. Among the file-cards for the living and the dead, one – of an apparently ordinary woman – will transform his life. Breaking away from his strict routine, José resolves to track the woman down, obsessively following a thread of clues in a bid to rescue her from an oblivion deeper than the grave. 
 
 'When a very good book finds us at just the right moment in life, it can become stitched into our own identity. All the Names – a novel about identity and connection – has become stitched into mine' Samantha Harvey, Independent

All The Names

Jacqueline Harpman

'THE ’90S GENDER SWAP NOVEL YOU NEED TO READ NOW' (NEW YORK TIMES), FROM THE AUTHOR OF I WHO HAVE NEVER KNOWN MEN 
 
There’s a voice in Aline’s head: a voice that wants out. 
 
Brash, boisterous and sexually adventurous, this voice seems to be the antithesis of Aline, a prim literature professor for whom each day promises to be as quiet and conventional as the last. 
 
That is until, after thirty-five years of imprisonment, her alter ego breaks free. 
 
Taking on a life of his own, Orlanda – Aline’s second self – slips into the taut, rugged body of a young man. As Aline continues unaware, Orlanda follows, dragging gleeful chaos in his wake, vowing to leave both their existences forever altered. 
 
A bewitching fable, an androgynous dream, Orlanda is one woman’s reckoning with all the hidden sides of her soul. 
--- 
READER REVIEWS - JOIN THE ORLANDA OBSESSION: 
'Hilarious, life affirming, haunting…truly perfect in prose, plot, and concept. Just wow' 
'A powerful novel, witty, wicked and teasing' 
'It’s the perfect book' 
'This is the second book I've read by her and it's another masterpiece' 
'Reading this has confirmed Jacqueline Harpman as one of my favourite writers I’ve ever encountered'

Orlanda

Copi

Welcome to the gutters of 1970s Paris – and the darkly comic world of City of Rats. 
 
When pet rat Gouri finds himself locked out of his owner’s apartment, he has no choice but to strike out alone onto the pavements of Paris. But what begins as a strange and marvellous bedtime story - Gouri and his new friend Raka selling flour-coated worms to pigeons for spare change - soon spirals into an exhilarating whirlwind of murder, sex, unionised hamsters, courtroom drama, and, finally, Armageddon. 
 
Told through a series of letters from Gouri to Argentinian playwright Copi, City of Rats channels Copi’s lifelong fascination with society’s outcasts - queer people, immigrants, the homeless, and criminals - into a fiercely imaginative, unflinchingly provocative tale of a world hurtling into madness. 
 
'The greatest miniaturist of our age… Copi was a man of the Baroque, a Shakespeare, magically reincarnated in gay Paris' Cesar Aira 
 
'Copi is the sassiest, most decadent, poised, unpredictable, violent, galling, and marvellous of any author in the past quarter century' Charlie Hebdo 
 
TRANSLATED BY KIT SCHLUTER; WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY CESAR AIRA

City of Rats

Simone de Beauvoir

Laurence is a woman who appears to live an ideal life. 
 
Weekends in the country, weekdays in Paris – her life features all the trappings of 1960s French bourgeoisie. She has money, a handsome husband, two daughters and a lover. She also has a successful career as an advertising copywriter, though her mind unbidden writes copy while she’s at home, and dreams of domesticity in the office. 
 
But Laurence is a woman whose experience of life has always been overwritten by the expectation of perfection. It is only when her 10-year-old daughter, Catherine, starts to vocalise her despair about the unfairness of the world that Laurence begins to act, finally grappling with a life that prizes image over truth. 
 
TRANSLATED BY LAUREN ELKIN

The Image of Her

Heinrich Boll

As West German society increasingly took on a gloss of economic well-being, Boll's trenchant novesl cut through the sleek outward show to reveal festering fears and suppurating physic states excluding poison into the system. WOMEN IN A RIVER LANDSCAPE brings this process to a fierce, fince culmination. . . Boll brings a humane understanding as well as indignation to the predicament of characters who seem not only rainted culprits but also victims of history SUNDAY TIMES.

Women in a River Landscape

A nostalgic, jazz-soaked love-letter to a youth spent in pursuit of simple pleasures, from the Japan's most celebrated contemporary storyteller, Haruki Murakami 
 
Haunted by memories of a doomed love affair, and living in something of a strange hiatus in Tokyo, Pinball, 1973's narrator finds himself dreaming of the days he used to wile away playing pinball in J's Bar. Until one day he embarks on a quest: to find the exact model of pinball machine he played years earlier - the infamous three-flipper Spaceship. 
 
BRIEF ENCOUNTERS: classic novellas and captivating stories, to be read in a single sitting or savoured over days

Pinball, 1973

Mass-murdering authors. Writers at the head of a football-hooligan ring. A pilot who crafts his poetry in the sky. 
 
A tour de force of black humour and imaginary erudition, Nazi Literature in the Americas presents itself as a biographical dictionary of pan-American writers who espoused extreme right-wing ideologies in the 20th and 21st centuries. 
 
Terrifyingly witty and remarkably inventive, this is the virtuosic, one-of-a-kind masterpiece which brought Bolaño fame throughout the Spanish-speaking world. 
 
TRANSLATED BY CHRIS ANDREWS 
 
'The best and weirdest kind of literary game... A strangely profound place to get lost&rsquo; Financial Times 
 
&lsquo;A darkly comic celebration of the wilder horizons of writing, good, plodding, lunatic and terrible&rsquo; London Review of Books

Nazi Literature in the Americas

'Our very best writer today' Milan Kundera 
 
Ditie is a pint-sized hotel waiter with big dreams. 
 
Between pocketing stolen change from unsuspecting customers and reminiscing on nights spent at the local brothel, he fantasises about his immense - and imagined - riches. 
 
Then, ludicrously, Ditie’s dreams start to become reality. 
 
Yet while his chaotic adventures lead him to ever more glamorous hotels, beyond the sparkling dining halls, the forces of twentieth-century European history march on. 
 
A whirlwind of comic genius, a gut-punch of narrative power, this is the story of one small man’s rise and fall – or fall and rise – against the shadowy backdrop of Europe’s darkest days. 
 
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY ADAM THIRLWELL 
 
‘An extraordinary and subtly tragicomic novel’ 
New York Times 
 
‘Hrabal bounces and floats... with a gusting humour and a hushed tenderness of detail’ 
Julian Barnes 
 
‘A joyful, picaresque story, which begins with Baron Munchausen-like adventures and ends in tears and solitude.’ 
James Wood

I Served The King Of England

Featuring an introduction by Adam Thirlwell

Kaname’s marriage is disintegrating. 
 
It is the 1920s in Tokyo and he and his wife, Misako, are trapped in a parody of a progressive Western marriage. He escapes into the arms of a lover, whilst closing his eyes to the likelihood that his wife will do the same. But this unhappy arrangement can’t last. Misako’s father steps in, believing that their relationship has been damaged by the influence of a new and alien culture, attempting to heal the breach by educating his son-in-law in the Japanese traditions of aesthetic and sensual pleasure. Meanwhile a fixation with his father-in-law’s mistress is fermenting within Kaname. 
 
‘Chilling…Tanizaki is a master of ambiguity’ The Times 
 
‘Tanazaki pulls aside the shoji that screens Japanese home life to eavesdrop on what people are really saying and thinking behind their polite facades’ New York Times

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