Ian Parks grew up in a South Yorkshire mining family - as his new volume of poetry The Exile House hits the shelves, Jody Porter finds out his sources of inspiration.
Will Stone was left pondering an incoherent outing
This weekend sees a unique celebration of cinema at Glasgow's Southside Film Festival
It's 75 years since George Orwell’s The Road To Wigan Pier appeared and to mark the anniversary Stephen Armstrong has retraced Orwell’s route through northern England.
The boy was coming from the river. Barefoot, with his trousers rolled up above his knees, his legs covered in mud.
When he died in 2010 the communist writer Jose Saramago was regarded as one of the giants of European literature.
Noah Hawley's The Good Father (Hodder, £12.99) is the second book in a few months in which a middle-class US dad tries to cope with his son's arrest for an infamous murder.
At the core of Emmanuel Carrere's novel is the premise that from observing and experiencing the horrors and difficulties of others' lives we can both better appreciate our own existence and what we have in common with others.
Think back to the depressing days of apartheid South Africa in the mid-1960s, after the political and military vanguard of the liberation movement had been sentenced to decades in jail.
Michael Moorcock is a colossus, evidenced in this collection of his non-fiction reviews, diary entries, memories and ephemera stretching across half a century.
The largely illiterate and opportunistic Spanish conquistadors could not get their forked tongues around the Aztec word xocolatl so they bastardised it as chocolate.
In accord with the current fashion in sword-and-sorcery fantasy fiction, Mark Lawrence's Prince Of Thorns (Harper Voyager, £7.99) is exceptionally well-written - and terribly brutal.