Books published by Handheld Press

John Llewelyn Rhys (1911-1940) was born in Abergavenny, Wales, in the United Kingdom. He published The Flying Shadow in 1936 (also reissued by Handheld Press), and in 1939 published The World Owes Me A Living (filmed in 1945). Both were powerful novels about British aviation in the 1930s: the planes, the pilots, their need to be in the air, their skill and bravery, their hard-drinking lives, the long-distance record-breaking attempts, and death through accidents and taking one risk too many. This new edition of England is My Village, and The World Owes Me A Living is a stunning rediscovery of this brilliant writer. ‘Had he lived,’ an obituary  noted, ‘he might have become the Kipling of the RAF.’ Rhys’s prose is spare and direct, with no words wasted. The dialogue is immediate, conveying mood, emotion, relationships, character and action with precision. The stories date from 1936 to 1940 and remind us of the responsibilities placed on very young men flying thousands of feet up in the air in boxes of metal, petrol and canvas. The Introduction is written by Kate Macdonald and Luke Seaber.

It is 1935. Robert Owen is the only son from a Welsh vicarage, now a brilliant pilot and flying instructor, recently of the Royal Air Force. He has taken a new job at the flying school at Best, a prosperous cathedral town in England. Flying has never seemed so alluring and so terrifying. Human frailty is tested in the drilling and repetition of hours in flight, and Robert’s skills as a pilot and in diplomacy with pupils with delusions about their competence are tested to their limits. And then he falls in love, risking his heart as well as his body in the air.

T H White, author of The Sword in The Stone, The Once and Future King, The Goshawk, and many other works of English literature, died in Greece from a heart attack in 1964, aged 57. The eminent novelist and critic Sylvia Townsend Warner was asked to write his biography, now republished for a new generation. The biography was published in 1967 and was Warner’s greatest critical success since her first novel, Lolly Willowes (1926). It reveals White’s passion for life, for learning, and for animals and birds, particularly hawks and dogs; his self-exile to Ireland during the Second World War, the creation of The Sword in the Stone, the first in the tetralogy The Once and Future King, and the unexpected wealth and fame that came with the Disney cartoon of the same name, and the Broadway musical Camelot. Warner treats White’s repressed sexual predilections with humane understanding in this wise portrait of a tormented literary giant, written by a novelist and a poet.

Handheld Press presents a new classic short story anthology, combining the supernatural and archaeology. Archaeological historian Amara Thornton of the University of London, and archaeologist Katy Soar from the University of Winchester have curated stories of horror, ghosts, hauntings, and possession, all from archaeological excavation.

A powerful and moving novel from 1921, about the lives and choices of modern women, by Canadian author Marjorie Grant. This remarkable novel focuses on her predicament without wasting time on moral judgements.

This new anthology of Helen de Guerry Simpson's supernatural fiction selects the best of her unsettling writing, adding some little-known stories to her 1925 collection The Baseless Fabric.

D K Broster was one of the great British historical novelists of the twentieth century, but her Weird fiction has long been forgotten. Melissa Edmundson has collected eleven of Broster's best stories from her supernatural writing.

The first edition since 1946, with full colour illustrations throughout. Malcolm Saville's classic 1946 novel is about eleven-year old Jane's discovery of nature and country life during a year spent convalescing on her uncle's farm, after having been dangerously ill in post-war London.

In 2003 the former Women's Press editor and critic Sarah LeFanu published her acclaimed biography of Rose Macaulay with Virago Press. Dreaming of Rose is a memoir of a woman juggling the demands of teaching, research and writing while patching together a living.

John Buchan's 1932 novel The Gap in the Curtain was his last full-length work devoted to exploring a supernatural theme: if you were able to see one year into the future, what would you do with that foreknowledge? And what would it do to you?

This remarkable novel about wartime life and work is a companion to Blitz Writing (2019), Handheld Press's edition of Inez Holden's novella Night Shift (1941) and her wartime diaries It Was Different At The Time (1943). This edition includes three pieces of Holden's long-form journalism, detailing wartime life.

Women's Weird 2 will contain thirteen remarkably chilling stories originally published from 1891 to 1937, by women authors from the USA, Canada, the UK, India and Australia.

Personal Pleasures is a 1935 anthology of 80 short essays (some of them very short) about the things Rose Macaulay enjoyed most in life.

Melissa Edmundson has curated this selection of the best of Elinor Mordaunt's supernatural short fiction, which blend the technologies and social attitudes of modernity with the classic supernatural tropes of the ghost, the haunted house, possession, conjuration from the dead and witchcraft.

this remarkable cross-dressing woman, poet and activist, recovering an important part of British lesbian history and creating a testament to queerness and gender identity in Valentine's transgressive life.

Potterism is about the Potter newspaper empire, and the ways in which journalists struggled to balance the truth and what would sell, during the First World War and into the 1920s. When Jane and Johnny Potter are at Oxford they learn to despise their father's popular newspapers, though they still end up working for the family business.

All Rose Macaulay's anti-war writing, collected together in one fascinating and thought-provoking volume. Her novel Non-Combatants and Others (1916), her journalism for The Spectator, Time & Tide, The Listener and other magazines from the mid-1930s to the end of the Second World War, and her only wartime short story, `Miss Anstruther's Letters'.

Where Stands A Winged Sentry, taken from the author's war diaries, conveys the tension, frustration and bewilderment of the progression of the Second World War, and the terror of knowing that the worst is to come, but not yet knowing what the worst will be.

British Weird is a new anthology of classic Weird short fiction by British writers, first published between the 1890s and the 1930s.

Gothic scholar Melissa Edmundson has brought together a compelling collection of the best Weird short stories by women from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The Caravaners (1909) is a devastating comedy about an Edwardian caravan holiday in Kent, narrated by the pompous and self-important Baron, a Prussian Major in the German army. It reveals the lost world of European crusted assumptions that disappeared forever with the First World War, and is one of the funniest feminist novels ever written.

Emerging out of the 1940-1941 London Blitz, the drama of these two short works by Inez Holden, a novel and a memoir, comes from the courage and endurance of ordinary people met in the factories, streets and lodging houses of a city under bombardment.

Zelda Fitzgerald's rapidly-written only novel, Save Me The Waltz (1932) covers the period of her life that her husband F Scott Fitzgerald had been using for years while writing his Tender is the Night (1934). It is now recognised as a classic novel of woman's experience and an authentic record of the Jazz Age.

Jan Jacob Slauerhoff (1898-1936) was a ship's doctor serving in south-east Asia, and is one of the most important twentieth-century Dutch-language writers. His 1934 novel Adrift in the Middle Kingdom (Het leven op aarde), is an epic sweep of narrative that takes the reader from 1920s Shanghai to a forgotten city beyond the Great Wall of China.

What Not is Rose Macaulay's speculative novel of post-First World War eugenics and newspaper manipulation that anticipated Aldous Huxley's Brave New World by 14 years. Media barons challenge the Ministry of Brains about the illegal affair of its senior staff.

The Runagates Club is John Buchan's last collection of short stories, and is a classic of British interwar short fiction. These twelve stories were written from 1913 to 1927, when he was at the peak of his powers, reprinted here with a critical introduction by Kate Macdonald.