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A Jingle Jangle Song
by Mariana Villa-Gilbert
Introduction by Christopher Adams
Pre-orders available now
Publication Date 29 January 2026
Booksellers! download the Advance Information Sheet
“You get fed up singing jingle jangle songs and doing gigs around the country. There’s no time to wonder, no time to lie in the grass and dream. One loses so much: one just isn’t a real person any more.”
Late 60s London, folk singer Sarah Kumar arrives to give a concert. She is hot stuff and a hot mess – androgynous, awkward and alluring. Kumar attends hip parties, sings to her fans and passes out wasted. She is a picture of consummate coolness, hid nervously behind huge sunglasses – a subversive imagining of a strong queer female lead amid the commercial folk boom.
Inside the countercultural throng, Kumar’s life is soon derailed by an encounter with an older woman, the intoxicating Mrs Stankovich.
Buried in the archives for far too long, A Jingle Jangle Song is the lost queer novel of the late 1960s. Eccentric and atmospheric, sweet and satirical, the novel celebrates how queer desire erupts in unexpected – and unignorable – ways.
“A Jingle Jangle Song brings into the light neglected modes of daily, queer, racialised experience, and commits to being wholly new and strange. It's a triumph and I'm so glad Lurid Editions has put it in our hands again”—Noreen Masud, author of A Flat Place
“To read A Jingle Jangle Song is to discover a missing link in the tradition of the 20th century lesbian novel. It speaks back to The Well of Loneliness and to The Price of Salt, it speaks forward to the Jeanette Winterson of Written on the Body. At the same time, the world it creates in its spare, compressed way is uncannily contemporary — encompassing celebrity culture, gender fluidity, the politics of body hair”—Leigh Wilson, Publisher, Spiracle Audiobooks
"The heartrending is audible . . . this novella is at once urbane, tender and brutal. Queer desire painted in vivid strokes and furtive dashes through protests and parties of 1960s London. To be devoured whole in one sitting"—Helen Palmer, author of Pleasure Beach
“A lesbian love story set against the rapacity of the music business”—Jane Cholmeley, author of A Bookshop of One's Own
by Mariana Villa-Gilbert
Introduction by Christopher Adams
Pre-orders available now
Publication Date 29 January 2026
Booksellers! download the Advance Information Sheet
“You get fed up singing jingle jangle songs and doing gigs around the country. There’s no time to wonder, no time to lie in the grass and dream. One loses so much: one just isn’t a real person any more.”
Late 60s London, folk singer Sarah Kumar arrives to give a concert. She is hot stuff and a hot mess – androgynous, awkward and alluring. Kumar attends hip parties, sings to her fans and passes out wasted. She is a picture of consummate coolness, hid nervously behind huge sunglasses – a subversive imagining of a strong queer female lead amid the commercial folk boom.
Inside the countercultural throng, Kumar’s life is soon derailed by an encounter with an older woman, the intoxicating Mrs Stankovich.
Buried in the archives for far too long, A Jingle Jangle Song is the lost queer novel of the late 1960s. Eccentric and atmospheric, sweet and satirical, the novel celebrates how queer desire erupts in unexpected – and unignorable – ways.
“A Jingle Jangle Song brings into the light neglected modes of daily, queer, racialised experience, and commits to being wholly new and strange. It's a triumph and I'm so glad Lurid Editions has put it in our hands again”—Noreen Masud, author of A Flat Place
“To read A Jingle Jangle Song is to discover a missing link in the tradition of the 20th century lesbian novel. It speaks back to The Well of Loneliness and to The Price of Salt, it speaks forward to the Jeanette Winterson of Written on the Body. At the same time, the world it creates in its spare, compressed way is uncannily contemporary — encompassing celebrity culture, gender fluidity, the politics of body hair”—Leigh Wilson, Publisher, Spiracle Audiobooks
"The heartrending is audible . . . this novella is at once urbane, tender and brutal. Queer desire painted in vivid strokes and furtive dashes through protests and parties of 1960s London. To be devoured whole in one sitting"—Helen Palmer, author of Pleasure Beach
“A lesbian love story set against the rapacity of the music business”—Jane Cholmeley, author of A Bookshop of One's Own