When poet Rose Drew landed in America for a new job, she’d barely touched down before a devastating diagnosis threw all her plans to the wind. Reacting as only a poet can, Rose wrote FrankenTit, a frank, funny and harrowing anthology charting her experiences from diagnosis to mastectomy to reconstruction and radiation therapy.

Freddie Mercury was a master of theatrical excess, a vocalist of extraordinary power and a songwriter capable of turning the most intimate emotions into arena-sized anthems. Yet behind the flamboyant stage persona was a private individual whose thoughts and feelings were often concealed from public view.

Facing the Music It's not frost; it's snow It's not backfire; it's gun-fire It's not fun; it's alcoholism It's not a tantrum; it's violence It's not witty; it's abuse It's not marriage; it's divorce It's not anger; it's rage It's not nothing; it's a lump It's not fear; it's reality It's not sleep; it's death It's not au revoir; it's the end Perhaps the misi…

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.

What must it feel like to be hanged, only to wake up four hours later, in your own coffin, and to climb out and walk into your own wake? Ask Maggie Dickson, because in Chapter One of The Mourning Necklace that is precisely what happens to her. The year is 1724 and the place, Edinburgh. Will the honest men of law decide to give her a reprieve or will they choose to hang her again?

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.

Among the Talk and the Laughter Why does he fall silent? Why does that terrible, sad look tell he has gone away? He has died too often.

Two illustrated books — one a plea for Britain's vanishing birdlife, the other a journey back through deep time — have taken the top honours at the UK's foremost nature and conservation writing awards, in a year the judges said proved storytelling can still be "a powerful step towards awareness, action, and ultimately, hope".

My friend asked me if I had any books on sobriety. Having never had a drink in her life, she wanted to understand her new partner's five-year recovery. Being the go-to for matters of addiction, abuse, and homelessness (I'm quite the library), I furnished her with a few, assuming that the reason I'd hung on to them was they were the best of the crop. Time passed.

Hilltop You see it sometimes: the way the light strikes a distant hill, singling out that space between trees like a sudden bolt of memory, or an answer coming through from the other side. A benign shock of emergent energy, Ruth Sharman's fine, profoundly distilled poem encourages a sense of the falling away of scales, of belated recognition.

The introduction to this novel tells us it is ‘the portrait of a middle-aged, middle-class housewife’, but that does it an injustice because it is so much more. The intro also says that ‘even if a literary work concerns unintellectual subjects, it is, nonetheless, the product of intellect’. How true!

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…

The Pheasant breaking cover - its fluster of browns and greys like the unpainted sides of piano keys you only see when it's played. Ali Lewis' poems often reside on the margin of suggestion. That, in 'The Pheasant', he appears to have achingly little to say need not obscure the vista of meaning that his threadbare, but steadily observed, lines open on to.

Nature and conservation writing's biggest UK prize has revealed its 2026 shortlists, with 43 books across six categories vying for honours at a September ceremony at Kent's Elmley Nature Reserve.

When in any doubt or perhaps when facing too much choice, it’s a safe bet to reach for an old faithful, so I did just that when I picked this Grisham from the TBR pile by the bed. For the uninitiated, TBR means To Be Read or should that be BTBR – Begging To Be Read.

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.

Heredity I am the family face; Flesh perishes, I live on. Projecting trait and trace Through time to times anon, And leaping from place to place Over oblivion.

A change is as good as a rest they say and this novella is certainly a change. If you need waking up, this is the book for you, with its short chapters and fast pace. Despite the narrator’s protestations, it is not an advice manual, not a manual of good advice, at least.

The Old Pantry Sun angles for a perch of glass, Cups alight on their scroll hooks. Life transfers to bone china Her sparkling buds and lustres. Oilcloth glistens to cut scraps of light, A dimmed or glittering stillness, But from the dark, the recessed silence, White food floats dim surfaces.

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’ve always thought that George Mallory’s raison d’etre for taking on the onerous burden of Everest’s North Face lacked gravitas; intended to convey an existential compulsion, his now-seminal phrase - ‘because it’s there’ - is inexpressive, listless, inadequate to the task of embodying a matter, quite literally, of life and death.

They’re back, The Thursday Murder Club! The residents of Cooper’s Chase Retirement Village. Elizabeth, Joyce, Ron and Ibrahim are on the trail of the baddies once more and, as ever, are aided by Chris and Donna and of course, Bogdan, among others. The familiarity is comforting, like a cup of cocoa on a winter’s day. It’s a new puzzle but you know you’re surrounded by helpful friends.

When I Land in Northern Ireland When I land in Northern Ireland I long for cigarettes, for the blue plume of smoke hitting the lung with a thud and, God, the quickening blood as the stream administers the nicotine. Stratus shadows darkening the crops when coming in to land, coming in to land.

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.

Harrogate International Festivals today announced the 18 titles longlisted for the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award 2026, the UK and Ireland’s most prestigious crime fiction award, now in its twenty second year.