These are the songs that we have listened to, laughed to, loved to and laboured to, as well as downed tools and danced to. Covering the last seven decades, Stuart Maconie looks at the songs that have sound tracked our changing times, and – just sometimes – changed the way we feel. Beginning with Vera Lynn’s ‘We’ll Meet Again’, a song that reassured a nation parted from their loved ones by the turmoil of war, and culminating with the manic energy of ‘Bonkers’, Dizzee Rascal’s anthem for the push and rush of the 21st century inner city, The People’s Songs takes a tour of our island’s pop music, and asks what it means to us. This is not a rock critique about the 50 greatest tracks ever recorded. Rather, it is a celebration of songs that tell us something about a changing Britain during the dramatic and kaleidoscopic period from the Second World War to the present day. Here are songs about work, war, class, leisure, race, family, drugs, sex, patriotism and more, recorded in times of prosperity or poverty. This is the music that inspired haircuts and dance crazes, but also protest and social change. The companion to Stuart Maconie’s landmark Radio 2 series, The People’s Songs shows us the power of ‘cheap’ pop music, one of Britain’s greatest exports. These are the songs we worked to and partied to, and grown up and grown old to – from ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ to ‘Rehab', ‘She Loves You’ to ‘Star Man’, ‘Dedicated Follower of Fashion’ to ‘Radio Ga Ga’.

Two outcasts in medieval England are brought together and share a destiny of passion in the third of the Velvet Montgomery Annals Quadrilogy from the New York Times bestselling author of The Duchess. With her father murdered, her home burned, lovely Alyx Blackelt fled to the woods and found sanctuary in the camp of Raine Montgomery, a nobleman outlawed by the king’s edict. There she hid her beauty in the guise of a boy, and her sorrow in her work as Montgomery’s squire. But how long could such loveliness as hers be hidden? How long could such a gallant man’s desires be blind? And how soon—even as a blood feud raged between the Montgomery family and the Chatworth, as angry swords clattered in the name of family honor—one woman’s love would make all the difference...one woman’s love would inflame a hero’s passion, touch a kings pity, and raise a song of praise in every English heart.

Upstate New York, at the confluence of the great Hudson River and its mighty tributary the Mohawk —from this stunning landscape came the creation of a new world of science. In 1887, Thomas Edison moved his Edison Machine Works here and in 1892, it became the headquarters of a major manufacturing company, giving the town its nickname: Electric City. The peak of Autumn, 1919: The pull of scientific discovery brings Charles Proteus Steimetz, a brilliant mathematician and recent arrival from Ellis Island, to town. His ability to capture lightning in a bottle earns him the title "Wizard of Electric City." Barely four feet tall with a deeply curving spine, Steinmetz's physical deformity belies his great intellect. Allied with his Mohawk friend Joseph Longboat and his adopted eleven–year–old granddaughter Midget, the advancements he makes in Electric City will, quite simply, change the world. The peak of Autumn, 1965: Sophie Levine, the daughter of a company man, one of the many scientists working at The Company, whose electric logo can be seen from everywhere in town. Her family escaped Europe just before World War II, leaving behind a wake of annihilation and persecution. Ensconced in Electric City, Sophie is coming of age just as the town is gasping its last breaths. The town, and America as a whole, is on the cusp of great instability: blackouts, social unrest over Vietnam, and soon the advent of the seventies. Into her orbit drifts Henry Van Curler, the favored son of one of Electric City's founding Dutch families, as well as Martin Longboat, grandson of Joseph Longboat. This new generation of Electric City will face both the history of their town and their own uncertain future, struggling to bridge the gap between the old world and the new. Electric City is a vital, pulsing, epic novel of America, of its great scientific ingenuity and its emotional ambition; one that frames the birth and evolution of its towns against the struggles of its indigenous tribes, the immigrant experience, a country divided, and the technological advancements that ushered in the modern world.

Includes entries for maps and atlases.