Item category 2: City of Literature

Set in the 1790s in the Yorkshire seaside town of Monkshaven Elizabeth Gaskell called Sylvia's Lovers the 'saddest story I ever wrote'. In it she deals profoundly with the themes of unrequited love, jealousy and individual choices.

Set in the context of Victorian social and medical debate, this novel is about rebellion, posing fundamental questions about the nature of social authority and obedience. This revised edition draws on recent theoretical work on gender and class.

Anthony Burgess' epic work revolves around a writer, Kenneth Toomey, and the man he is linked to through family ties, Carlo Campanati, an Italian priest and a candidate for sainthood. Toomey, now in his eighties recalls the past.

A debut collection from a young poetess, encountering a dazzling array of characters from Harry Potter's owl and Oscar Wilde to a flock of Cumbrian sheep.

Frank O'Hara (1926-66) is among the most radical poets of the 20th century. He is celebrated for his apparently unpremeditated poems, autobiographical and immediate, 'any time, any place'. He may have scribbled poems on serviettes, but others he worked on with intense concentration. This selectio...

A story of ambition and opportunity, providence and survival, that explores a family's bond of unspoken love and loyalty. Beginning in Manchester in 1930, it follows Nell, who grows up to work in a factory, and her younger brother, Bobby, who finds himself fighting in the jungles of Malaya.

From the bestselling author of 'Blue Mondays' comes a collection of short stories. These stories represent Grunberg's early short fiction, written between 1991 and 1996.

It is quite a shock for a seven-year-old to be whisked away from the New York streets to an English stately home and be told he is to inherit a title and a fortune. But then Little Lord Fauntleroy is a very unusual boy.

The after effects of an unsolved child murder in 1963 resonate decades later when the investigating officer George Bennett tells a journalist what happened. When he unaccountably pulls the plug the journalist begins to dig up some startling facts.