Item category 2: City of Literature

Lemn Sissay's first poetry collection was written aged 18 and hand-sold to miners on the picket lines of Warrington. Since then his poems have been sculpted in iron and built from concrete, declaimed in over 20 countries. He has performed to thousands of football fans at the FA Cup Final, to hund...

Travis Stillwell spends his nights searching out women in honky-tonk bars on the back roads of Texas. What he does with them doesn't make him proud - it just quiets the demons for a little while. But when he crosses paths with one particular mysterious pale-skinned girl, he wakes up weak and bloo...

Mum always knows best. Meet the daughters of Iris Parker. Dee; sensitive and big-hearted; Rose uptight and controlled and Fleur the reckless free spirit. At the reading of their mother's will, the 3 estranged women are aghast to discover that their inheritance comes with very tricky strings attac...

Oscar-winning Raphael's wickedly funny memoir progresses into years of controversy in literary and film worlds. Raphael records observations of a life lived in Hollywood and London.

In this revelatory and redemptive book Jackie Kay tells the story of her own life. It is a book about belonging and beliefs, strangers and family, biology and destiny and what makes us who we are.

Passengers boarding the 10.35 train from Manchester Piccadilly to London Euston are bound for work, assignations, reunions, holidays or new starts, with no idea that their journey is about to be brutally curtailed. Holly has just landed her dream job, and Jeff is heading for his first ever work i...

A father desperate to be with his young son escapes from a secure psychiatric hospital, knowing he has just one chance for the two of them to start a new life together. His goal is to snatch the three-year-old - a diabetic who needs insulin to stay alive - and run away to France - but first he mu...

'The Tragic Death' presents a set of dramatic lyric poems about the alluring and tragic consequences of translation in its many guises. Tara Bergin is a winner of the Seamus Heaney Prize.

This unique collection of poems from the Poet Laureate, filled with her characteristic wit, is a feminist classic and a modern take on age-old mythology. Behind every famous man is a great woman - and from the quick-tongued Mrs Darwin to the lascivious Frau Freud, from the adoring Queen Kong to t...