Item category 2: City of Literature

The third part of Neil Campbell's 'Manchester Trilogy,' in which our struggling young writer finds love with a girl called Cho. Where a love song to Manchester becomes a love song to Cho. 'Lanyards' explores how the jobs we wear around our necks dictate the ways we are identified. Building on the...

At the age of 90-something, Beryl Dusinbery is forgetting everything - including her own children. She spends her days stitching morbid samplers and tormenting her two long-suffering carers, Nastya and Euphoria, with tangled stories of her husbands and love affairs. Shimi Carmelli can do up his o...

Behind the normal door of a normal house, in a normal street, two men are slowly driving each other insane. One of them is a psychopath. The father, Mr Todd, is at his wits' end. He's been robbed of his job as a tax inspector and is now stuck at home - with him.

In 1487 Sir Henry Bodrugan, pursued for treason, leapt from a Cornish clifftop into a waiting boat and fled to France. 'Bodrugan's Leap', as the clifftop has come to be known, lies close to John Wilkinson's childhood home, and supplies the title for the central cycle of poems in 'My Reef My Manif...

Spring marks the genesis of nature's year. As Earth's northern hemisphere tilts ever more towards the life-giving sun, the icy, dark days of winter gradually yield to the new season's intensifying light and warmth. Nature responds.

A new selection of Elizabeth Jennings' best work, including the 1979 'Carcanet Selected' in its entirety with additional poems drawn from her subsequent collections up until her death.

Johnny is 19. He likes music, art and going to the beach. He is also autistic - he will probably never get a job, never have a girlfriend, never leave home. And over the last 18 years this is what his father, TV producer and comedy writer Henry Normal and his wife Angela have been trying to come ...

On Christmas Night in 1881, John Manley, a poor son of Irish immigrants living in the slums of Leeds, was fatally stabbed in a foolish drunken quarrel. The frightened murderer went on the run, knowing that capture could see him hang. A few generations later, author Catherine Czerkawska begins to...

Following his acclaimed 'Pandemonium', Thomas McCarthy's 'Prophecy' dwells on childhood memory, romantic love and the varieties of human attachment. Still embodying his distinctive voice and craft, in these poems McCarthy risks more prophetic moods and themes. There are poems on illness and recov...

Telling the true stories of asylum seekers who've suffered at the hands of Britain's policy of indefinite detention, in the form of a modern-day Canterbury Tales.