Lucy is pregnant after a one-night stand with Sam from Brooklyn. The thing is that’s all she knows about him even if she does still feel that the spark between them was real. The novel opens with a somewhat rebellious Lucy (real name Lucia) working in a bar in Brooklyn, having travelled from Italy, to try to find Sam.

Carmella de Keyser is at her most persuasive when in freefall: plummeting through the ‘cyan blue’ with Icarean abandon and crossing borders of the senses as though synaesthetic apprehension were a most natural condition of understanding, the poet promulgates a new aesthetic, subordinating all formal considerations to the moment of pure invigoration.

Otley crime writer Colin Campbell draws on 30 years of real-life policing – including 15 years working on crime scenes – for the latest adventure featuring his uncompromising Yorkshire cop. A retired West Yorkshire Police officer who spent 15 years dealing with real-life crime scenes has drawn on three decades at the sharp end of policing for his latest crime thriller.

To read Michael Rosen’s poems out loud is to hear an echo. For to give voice to a random selection of his most performable verses is to be accompanied by Rosen himself, declaiming at one’s shoulder, but with infinitely greater skill and idiosyncratic grace.

A new edition of The Bee argues that Britain's reading crisis looks rather different once you know where to look. Britain, we are told, has stopped reading.

From Cheshire For Anna Come home safe: I think of you driving Over the Runcorn Bridge in our senile car, Its toothless ratchets, arthritic pistons conniving To take me away from wherever you are. Its steering like that old prostitute working a living on Huskisson Street outside our door: Its raggedy brake shoes thin as the wind, giving Nothing but ice to your foot on the floor.

The north’s longest-running literary festival, Ilkley Literature Festival, has announced its 2026 line-up. A host of household names including politicians, national treasures, journalists, novelists, poets, historians, comedians, and academics head to the spa town across 17 packed days from Friday 2 to Sunday 18 October.

The Bayeux Tapestry, a seventy-metre long embroidery, which tells the story of the French invasion of Britain and the Battle of Hastings in 1066, is a masterpiece. It has also come to the UK for the first time in nearly one thousand years, to be displayed in the British Museum, from September ’26 to July ’27, and tickets to see it are selling fast.

Soirée One funny thing about loving someone is how much you'll put up with - her parents' conversazione for example, or being sweet to these fools she works with who smoke inferior cigars and think it's savoir vivre, and drag me back to drink inadequately and long past my bedtime, and put on records (God!) stuff like Ray Conniff.

Pretending not to Sleep The waiting rooms are full of ‘characters’ Pretending not to sleep. Your eyes are open But you’re far away At home, am Rhein, with mother and the cats. Your hair grazes my wrist. My cold hand surprises you. The porters yawn against the slot-machines And watch contentedly; they know I’ve lost.

This book came recommended to me by another lover of reading. It is so good to be offered something you might not pick up yourself.

Trust Me What can be discussed in words I beg to state in brief. A man has only one death: it may be as light as goose down or as heavy as a fatted hog. Gingerly the flowers open and are crushed in the vat. What's in your new perfume?

Alison Marshall’s capturing of a circuitous historical journey between Russia, South Africa and the UK embodies, almost by definition, a testament of first-hand witness: following in the footsteps of her grandparents, by means of a long correspondence conducted over several pre-war months, Marshall painstakingly pieces together an unbreakable relationship whose strength brokers the pain…

Dicks There was little on which we did not draw a dick, compassing grey paint off lockers, etching desks, but mostly inking each other’s files or textbooks, apostles casting cocks across the Sea of Galilee, Tybalt shaking terrible showers onto poor Juliet, dark colossi swung over relief maps of Gallipoli, some veiny and ridged, some rushed as signatures.

This novel opens in the Henderson household, the everyday ‘chitchat’ establishing the ‘cosy’ genre. Who knew that a small florist’s business in the Lake District could be so busy, but Simmy is rushed off her feet. Husband, Christopher, is just as busy at his auction house in Keswick and between them, they juggle the care of their only son, Robin, who is two.

Marky Is minic do bhris béal duine a shrón. - Irish proverb Watching this cormorant on the Wharfe hold open its wings to the admiring sun, I recall Marky Malone on his stag night removing his silk suit jacket very slowly to show off his Bullworker pecs to us and the man he'd picked out to fight - who smartly coshed him across his beak and swanned out of the silent public bar…

Yorkshire crime author Roshan Pitteea will travel to Scotland later this month to meet readers and fellow writers at one of the UK's fastest-growing independent author events.

Few writers are able to nail the retrospective surreality of a place and time in history with the elegant efficiency of Bill Broady. Set against the backdrop of a seedy, institutionally misogynistic and terminally necrotic Leeds of the 1970s, the unnamed narrator of There’s No ‘F’ In Wonderful is a knowing flâneur, a recorder of the sociocultural zeitgeist.

This is a beautiful novel which evokes all sorts of emotions. Set in Trinidad and partly in New York City, it is written in a patois which has a musical lilt to it and which quickly becomes familiar. Likewise, although the dialogue is not punctuated, it is laid out in such a way as to make it easily readable.

Sleeping Through He wakes, reaches for my hand and says ‘it’s very morning’, which is true.

Abra-Cadabra My mother had more magic in her thumb than the length and breadth of any magician Weaving incredible stories around the dark-green senna brew just to make us slake the ritual Sunday purgative Knowing how to place a cochineal poultice on a fevered forehead Knowing how to measure a belly's symmetry kneading the narah pains away Once my baby sister stuffed a split-pea up her no…

I have often wondered where ‘The Book Club’ originated. It seems (I think) to be a predominantly female affair. From what I’ve heard, some groups are very serious and engage in rigorous debates about ‘this week’s choice’; some are more gossip-fests where the wine flows freely and local scandal is shared.

When the book arrived, I flicked through it initially and spotted the phrase, ‘Mel…the motorbike’ and thought this may just be for me. The prologue is set in London in 1941 and we’re introduced to Mel Greenway, on her nineteenth birthday, the day ‘the letter’ dropped through the letterbox, the letter inviting her to enlist.

Happiness ...but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain THOMAS HARDY Cloudless skies, old roses coming into flower, a breeze flicking through The Mayor of Casterbridge. Toasted granary bread with damson jam, a pair of goldfinches on the bird-feeder. The whiff of fennel and rosemary, the farmer’s quad bike leaving the field.

2026 marks the centenary of a landmark in Scottish literature, though so far little appears to be happening to mark the occasion. Hugh MacDiarmid, whose A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle reshaped Scottish poetry through inventive language and modernist ambition, might not have been surprised by the lack of fanfare.