Item category 2: City of Literature

Detective Aidan Waits is in trouble After a career-ending mistake, he's forced into a nightmare undercover operation that his superiors don't expect him to survive. Isabelle Rossiter has run away again. When the teenage daughter of a prominent MP joins Zain Carver, the enigmatic criminal who Wait...

This volume is a joyful documentation of the unfamiliar and the first full collection from 24 year old Phoebe Power, 2009 Foyle Young Poet of the Year. A young woman searching for love and understanding in 21st century Britain finds herself away from home. Wandering in rural Austria, she observes...

As formally disciplined as they are thematically unsettling, Ned Denny's poems open up a twilit, numinous world of exotic drugs, subterranean drums and visionary apprehension in which - to quote David Lynch's 'Twin Peaks' - 'the woods are wondrous, but strange'. In his seductive and compelling Ly...

There does not appear to be anything remarkable about the fatal car crash on the A35. But one question dogs Inspector Georges Gorski: where has the victim, an outwardly austere lawyer, been on the night of his death? The troubled Gorski finds himself drawn into a mystery that takes him behind the...

A young girl collapses from hunger and is nursed back to health by a pack of dogs. A grieving woman remembers her absent father and her failure to keep her promise to him. A struggling writer conjures her muse into being, walking every inch of the city in search of inspiration. In 'Thirteen Month...

In the autumn of 1936, some 200 men from the Tyneside town of Jarrow marched the 300 miles to London in protest against the destruction of their town and industries. Precisely 80 years on, Stuart Maconie retraces the route of this emblematic English journey, romantically dubbed the Jarrow Crusade...

In a post-Brexit Britain filled with low paid zero hours jobs a young man navigates the world through his writing and in doing so pens a bittersweet love song to Manchester. A perfectly pitched short novel, a little gem of a book that goes beyond what the politicians have to say and gets to the r...

Jeff Noon returns with a staggering hallucinogenic sequel to 'A Man of Shadows', taking hapless investigator John Nyquist into a city where reality is contaminated by the imagination of its citizens. In a city dissolving into an infected sprawl of ideas, where words come to life and reality is co...

The poetry of Gaia Holmes delves deep beneath the urban and the quotidian to reveal a strange and exotic other-life. Her carnival of characters - bingo callers, burger sellers, critical theorists - are all cast from the least expected places, but find a new voice and a new ability to captivate.

In these intimate, sometimes painfully frank poems, Andrew McMillan takes us back to childhood and early adolescence to explore the different ways we grow into our sexual selves and our adult identities. Examining our teenage rites of passage: those dilemmas and traumas that shape us - eating dis...