Matthew Sturgis - Even if Oscar Wilde had led a mundane existence he would still be remembered today because of his sparklingly modern plays and iconoclastic essays. But it’s because his life reads like a Victorian melodrama (or a Greek tragedy, as I’m su…

Daniel James - Ezra Maas is one of the most significant artists of the 20thcentury, winning a whole raft of awards and critical acclaim. An enigmatic figure he is often likened to JD Salinger due to his reclusive nature. He is also entirely fictional. Thi…

John Robert Brown - The redoubtable local publishers IRON Press continue to provide a platform for poets who might otherwise have fallen down the back of the settee and in John Robert Brown they have a real gem. As the subheading of this collection indica…

Elly Griffiths, Quercus - Clare Cassidy is an English teacher who has a love for Victorian ghost stories, an especial favourite being ‘The Stranger’, a chiller written by (the fictional) RM Holland. She is particularly drawn to his life and works because …

Stormzy, Merky Books - The author of this book of recent pop history is billed as Stormzy, but it has mostly been pulled together by Jude Yawson. He’s a young writer who has secured a place for himself in the burgeoning array of talents that have found th…

Laurence Cane-Honeysett - 2018 marked the fiftieth anniversary of Trojan Records, a record label and real British success story. They played a key role in making reggae globally popular with many of the genre’s major stars being connected to Trojan includ…

Barry Fox - I don’t usually go a bundle for self-published curios, but in this case I’m going to make an exception. As far as I can gather Barry Fox is a local fellow who makes bizarro art and artefacts in the manner of Jean-Michel Basquiat having a fever…

Patrick deWitt - The Canadian author Patrick deWitt scored a huge hit with his 2011 novel ‘The Sisters Brothers’ (which has just been made into a film) and ‘French Exit’, his latest, is every bit as good. It begins in modern day Manhattan where we’re intr…

Angela Steidele - The story of Anne Lister’s life (1791-1840) may have slipped down the back of Time’s settee if it were not for a remarkable series of extensive diaries she kept. A self-absorbed woman she recorded great spools of her life, but much of it…

Pariah O’Donnell - The second novel from this Irish author begins with a deliciously dark chapter. We’re in Victorian London and a young seamstress arrives at a grand house in Mayfair. She is shown to the top floor where she ensconces herself alone in a r…

William Boyd - Towards the back end of the 19thcentury Brodie Moncur is working as a piano-tuner in Edinburgh. The firm he is working for have a piano showroom in Paris, but business is slow, and Brodie is offered the opportunity to relocate to the French…

Julia Darling - The novelist, poet and playwright Julia Darling was born in Winchester but moved to Newcastle in 1980. Her first novel ‘Crocodile Soup’ was long-listed for the Orange Prize while her second ‘The Taxi Driver’s Daughter’ was long-listed for …

Jonathan Coe - Jonathan Coe eviscerated Thatcherism in his 1994 satire ‘What a Carve Up!’ but for his latest novel he’s turned his hand to a rather trickier task: trying to make sense of the political gales that have buffeted England over recent years. Th…

Laura Purcell - Laura Purcell struck gothic gold with her debut novel ‘The Silent Companions’ and she’s also on fine form with her latest. Set in the mid-19thcentury she juggles the narrative between two protagonists: Ruth, a teenage seamstress who is in …

Sebastian Faulks - Disaffected Moroccan teenager Tariq lives with his father and stepmother in Tangier. He decides to run away with the vague notion of tracing the roots of his dead mother who lived in Paris. He eventually makes it to the City of Lights a…

Mark Hopkinson - “I like books that ramble on, that are like someone talking to you or you’re hearing thoughts. When I meet someone or just see them around I always think: what are you like? What’s happened to you?” That’s the 20-something hero of Mark Ho…

Richard Atkinson - Richard Atkinson can often be found banging out his work at poetry open mic slots around the region, and is part of the Scratch performance group. Charles Bukowski is an obvious influence on his work and he gets a couple of name checks …

Kate Atkinson - Kate Atkinson seems incapable of writing a bad sentence, never mind a bad novel, and she’s on fine form with her latest in which she covers some of the same ground that Anthony Quinn did in his recent, and very good, ‘Our Friends in Berlin…

John Boyne - When renowned gentleman of letters Erich Ackermann takes a fancy to Maurice Swift, a waiter working in a hotel in Berlin, he tries every way he can to ingratiate himself with the attractive young man, to the extent of offering him a job, of s…

Sarah Perry - Sarah Perry scored a huge hit with her last novel ‘The Essex Serpent’ set in a fictional English village circa the 1890s. Her latest takes place in modern day Prague and whereas the mysteries of ‘The Essex Serpent’ lay not so much in the sup…

Sally Rooney - With this, and her previous novel, ‘Conversations With Friends’, Sally Rooney appears to have cornered the market in people talking, and not talking, in rooms (as well as people saying what they mean, and, more pertinently, not saying what …

Esi Edugyan - The Canadian author Esi Edugyan scored a big hit with her previous novel, ‘Half Blood Blues’, which told the story of black jazz players in the Second World War. It was shortlisted for the Booker and Orange prizes, and ‘Washington Black’, he…

Rupert Thompson - In Rupert Thompson’s latest novel he fictionalises the lives of two French women who meet when they are teenagers in the early part of the twentieth century. Lucie Schwob shuns the conventions of the time – playing around with her sexual…

Anthony Quinn - Anthony Quinn is never more at home than when he’s elbow deep in mid-20thcentury, cake-mix Britain, all turned-up trousers, hair oil and plucky, can-do gels. And he’s in his element with ‘Our Friends in Berlin’, his latest novel, which is …

Matthew Klam - This debut novel sees Rich Fischer on his annual trip to a New England beachside town where he teaches students how to make their own autobiographical comics over the course of a week, and he’s just one of the teachers at the arts conferenc…

Lynne Truss - Set in 1950s Brighton, Lynne Truss’s latest is subtitled ‘A Constable Twitten Mystery’ and is the first in a mooted series, adapted from her BBC Radio 4 show. The town is policed by Inspector Steine who is something of a local celebrity afte…

David Stubbs - David Stubbs wrote the absorbing Future Days: Krautrock and the Building of Modern Germany and he brings the same amount of knowledge and enthusiasm to his latest book in which he charts the history of electronic music. You may think that s…

S.J.Morden - If you like your science-fiction as down-to-earth (well, down-to-Mars in this case) as possible, then you’ll appreciate the harsh, nuts and bolts integrity of local author Simon Morden’s latest novel. No flights of fancy here, but a gritty im…

Deirdre Foster - Local enterprise Iron Press continue to publish some of the most interesting and exciting poetry around as evidenced by this slim collection from Deirdre Foster, an Australian who now lives in the south west of the UK. Here she gives us l…

Anthony Flowers, Tyne Bridge Publishing, £10. Mainly portraits from the late 50s/early 60s, the subjects pose on the cobbled streets with a natural ease, Forsyth achieving a rare kind of intimacy with these people because they undoubtedly recognised that …

Lionel Shriver, HarperCollins, £16.99. Shriver struck a discordant family chord with the Orange Prize scooping “We Need To Talk About Kevin” and with her latest novel she is once again stretching the peculiar tensions of family life to breaking point. …

John Paul Davis, Peter Owen Publishers, £17.99. Henry III doesn’t get much box office when it comes to the biographical books stakes, but his reign (1216-1272) was an important and perhaps pivotal one when England really started to gain itself something o…

Andrew K. Shenton, Indepenpress Publication, £8.99. The TV series The Prisoner is perhaps the most enigmatic ever shown on primetime British TV and since its first screening in 1967 there has been reams of literature published relating to its “meaning”.…

Geoffrey Elborn, Dedalus, £15. After alcohol prohibition ended in Russia (it ran from the beginning of the First World War until 1924) the populace returned to vodka with gusto and a family of eight...…

Paul Carroll, Troubador, £8.99. The death of Princess Diana in 1997 proved to be something of a watershed moment for Britain. …

Adam Cadwell, Great Beast, £11.99. Rather like last month’s Book Of The Month (‘Ellerbisms’ by Marc Ellerby, also published by Great Beast), The Everyday began as an autobiographical web-comic that has now been collected into a handsome book.…

Dust On The Nettles, A.J. Blake, Troubador, £8.99. Nick Kellaway is a hedge fund manager, with offices in both Geneva and London, who has grown rich through managing other people’s money in unconventional ways… …

Kate Atkinson, Doubleday, £18.99. Atkinson puts her crime-solving detective Jackson Brodie on the backburner for her latest book which is an enthralling time-hopping (and history re-writing) epic that spans the first half of the twentieth century.…

Kick-Ass 2 Prelude: Hit-Girl, Mark Millar & John Romita Jr, Titan Books, £16.99. The Kick-Ass series has always sounded good in theory - kids in thrall to the Spiderman and Batman comics donning homemade costumes and patrolling the streets…

Nick Cardy & Renée Witterstaetter, Titan Books, £19.99. Nick Cardy is best known for his comic book work, joining DC comics in the 50s and working as an artist on titles such as Aquaman and Teen Titans, …

Kate Fox, Smokestack Books, £7.95. Smokestack Books are a Middlesbrough based publisher who seek to promote poets who don’t reside in ivory towers; poets who like to get out and about;…

Daniel Clifford & Lee Robinson, Art Heroes, £3. Art Heroes are a local enterprise who hold comicbook workshops aimed at getting young people interested in the creative side of comics.…

Richard Ford, Bloomsbury, £18.99. Ford’s latest novel kicks off with one of the most arresting openings of recent times: “First, I’ll tell about the robbery our parents committed. Then about the murders, which happened later.” …

Ellerbisms Marc Ellerby, Great Beast Comics, £12.99. Marc Ellerby is a UK comic book artist who began putting ‘Ellerbisms’ online in 2007, comic strips that, each day, outlined a particular moment that occurred in his life during the previous 24 hours. …

Tom Watson & Martin Hickman, Penguin, £8.99. Thank the lord for the dogged journalists, and MPs like Labour’s Tom Watson, for helping unravel one of the biggest outrages in recent British history;…

Peter McCarthy, The Mulholland Foundation, £15. I’d not previously come across the work of David Mulholland (1946-2005) but that’s my loss as he was an artist of rare quality, and this book …

Medlar Lucan & Durian Gray, Dedalus, £9.99 Lucan and Gray are two coves who have given their lives over to the pursuit of decadence, a fact reinforced by their previous tomes that include The Decadent Cookbook, The Decadent Gardener and The Decadent Trav…

Nicholas Pegg, Titan Books, 19.99 Why is David Bowie continually referred to as the ‘Chameleon of Pop’? Aren’t chameleons chiefly known for their ability to blend into the background - something surely no one can ever accuse Bowie of? (I consider him the…

Simon Goddard, Titan Books, £9.99 Are the songs of The Smiths worthy of the same amount of forensic analysis …

Perched imperiously on the banks of the Tyne, Spillers Mill once supplied one in every ten loaves of bread eaten in the UK.…