Handheld Press: 9 books

What Not is Rose Macaulay’s speculative novel of post-First World War eugenics and newspaper manipulation that influenced Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Published in 1918, What Not was hastily withdrawn due to a number of potentially libellous pages, and was reissued in 1919, but had lost its...

This new edition of Ernest Bramah’s What Might Have Been (1907), a classic satirical speculative novel of political resistance, is better known in its abridged form as The Secret of the League (1909). It mixes science fiction, social realism and office espionage, and accurately predicted the invention...

Desire is the story of an Edwardian New Woman who finds fulfilment in work and love. The heroine, Desire Quebell, can ignore society’s rules when she has a high social position, but when she is cast on her own resources, society won’t allow her to make her own living, until Peter Grimstone, the...

Endorsed with a cover blurb by Neil Gaiman. Sylvia Townsend Warner’s final collection of short stories was originally published in The New Yorker, and appeared in book form in 1977. This reprint brings these sixteen sly and enchanting stories of Elfindom to a new readership, and shows Warner’s...

The Akeing Heart is the story of the tormented relationships between the British novelist and poet Sylvia Townsend Warner; her life partner Valentine Ackland; the American who invaded their happiness, Elizabeth Wade White; and Elizabeth’s neglected lover Evelyn Holahan. Valentine was the serial...

Zelda Fitzgerald’s only novel, Save Me The Waltz (1932) was written in six weeks and covers the period of her life that her husband F Scott Fitzgerald had been drawing on for years while writing Tender is the Night (1934). She died in 1948. Save Me The Waltz is now recognised as a classic novel...

The Runagates Club (1928) was 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. Buchan designed The Runagates Club as a showcase to bring together the best...

‘If we don't sit here where have we to go?’ / ‘Well, there's our walk every day. And we are allowed out twice if it is fine, and our boating in summer, and our little visits to the church and to the convents.’ / ‘And you're twenty-one and I'm nineteen and a half,’ Kitty said hysterically....

Elizabeth von Arnim’s eighth novel is a sharp contrast to the sunny optimism of her first best-seller Elizabeth and her German Garden (1898) and her later hit The Enchanted April (1922, adapted several times for screen and stage, including the 1991 film). The Caravaners (1909) is a devastating comedy...