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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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

Rich Cohen

Rich Cohen's maternal grandfather was called Ben Eisenstadt. Ben was one of those Jews that, with an anger bred of exclusion, went on to reshape the world. He did so by inventing Sweet 'n Low, a granulated sweetener which, in its tiny pink packet, is still found on every table in every diner in America. This simple invention spawned one of the great American fortunes. This is the story of that fortune, how it was made and how it remade and tore apart everyone who touched it. 
 
In Sweet and Low, Rich Cohen - the youngest son of Ben's favourite daughter - takes a journey into his own and his family's past. It is a story of family feuds (his mother was eventually disinherited by her mother), eccentricity verging on madness, gangsters, lawyers, corruption, accountants, ex-wives - a quest for a secret history, a black comedy of the American dream.

Sweet and Low

A Family Story

Margarita Woodley

Crafting has never been more popular and Maggy Woodley, the creative force behind Red Ted, is passionate about making things with her children, Max, four, and Pippa, two. 
 
Using recycled materials and bits and bobs collected when out and about, here are over 60 utterly irresistible things to make with your kids. From adorable peanut shell finger puppets to walnut babies, loo roll marionettes and egg carton fairy lights, fabric mache bowls, stick men and shell crabs, stone people, and many more, these are projects for all the family to have fun with. And what's more, the end results are so cute and desirable that they look great around the home, or make wonderfully unique and personal gifts. 
 
With a funky, modern design and vibrant full colour photography throughout, this is a must-have addition to every young family's bookshelf.

Red Ted Art

Cute and Easy Crafts for Kids

Sofka Zinovieff

Faringdon House in Oxfordshire was the home of Lord Berners, composer, writer, painter, friend of Stravinsky and Gertrude Stein, a man renowned for his eccentricity – masks, practical jokes, a flock of multi-coloured doves – and his homosexuality. Before the war he made Faringdon an aesthete’s paradise, where exquisite food was served to many of the great minds, beauties and wits of the day. 
 
Since the early thirties his companion there was Robert Heber-Percy, twenty-eight years his junior, wildly physical, unscholarly, a hothead who rode naked through the grounds, loved cocktails and nightclubs, and was known to all as the Mad Boy. If the two men made an unlikely couple, at a time when homosexuality was illegal, the addition to the household in 1942 of a pregnant Jennifer Fry, a high society girl known to be ‘fast’, as Robert’s wife was simply astounding. 
 
After Victoria was born the marriage soon foundered (Jennifer later married Alan Ross). Berners died in 1950, leaving Robert in charge of Faringdon, aided by a ferocious Austrian housekeeper who strove to keep the same culinary standards in a more austere age. This was the world Sofka Zinovieff, Victoria’s daughter, a typical child of the sixties, first encountered at the age of seventeen. Eight years later, to her astonishment, Robert told her he was leaving her Faringdon House. 
 
Her book about Faringdon and its people is marvellously witty and full of insight, bringing to life a vanished world and the almost fantastical people who lived in it.

The Mad Boy, Lord Berners, My Grandmother And Me

Martin Toseland

Simon Toseland

Remember Blind Man's Bluff, Pin the Tail and Murder in the Dark? Making daisy chains and collecting conkers? And when rainy afternoons meant card games and battleships? 
 
Jam-packed with games and activities for all ages, 365 Family Games and Pastimes remembers all the classics we used to love, bringing them back for the entire family to enjoy. 
 
Full of inspiration and thrifty ideas, this is an indispensible collection for birthday parties, family holidays and everyday fun.

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