This book came recommended to me by another lover of reading. It is so good to be offered something you might not pick up yourself.

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…

This novel opens in the Henderson household, the everyday ‘chitchat’ establishing the ‘cosy’ genre. Who knew that a small florist’s business in the Lake District could be so busy, but Simmy is rushed off her feet. Husband, Christopher, is just as busy at his auction house in Keswick and between them, they juggle the care of their only son, Robin, who is two.

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.

This is a beautiful novel which evokes all sorts of emotions. Set in Trinidad and partly in New York City, it is written in a patois which has a musical lilt to it and which quickly becomes familiar. Likewise, although the dialogue is not punctuated, it is laid out in such a way as to make it easily readable.

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…

When the book arrived, I flicked through it initially and spotted the phrase, ‘Mel…the motorbike’ and thought this may just be for me. The prologue is set in London in 1941 and we’re introduced to Mel Greenway, on her nineteenth birthday, the day ‘the letter’ dropped through the letterbox, the letter inviting her to enlist.

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.

Not so much a valediction as a brief but sustained elegy for a life lived within achingly intimate distance of the past, David Rose’s short contemplation for Nightjar Press is a condition of its own uncertainty, of its own unreliability as a narrative.

A multi-billion pound arms deal between two governments, art forgery, vendetta and vengeance, corruption and murder, wrongful imprisonment: this novel has them all, set as it is in stately homes, an art gallery, the corridors of government and other, more seedy, locations.

Gaza The dead boy tries to open his eyes. He wants to see the world he is leaving. But there is nothing to see here, nothing and nothing, and anyway he is gone. His parents held him while he died but they are both dead, too.

A Yorkshire author, who is passionate about railway history, has just published a book celebrating the ground-breaking launch of the Stockton and Darlington Railway in 1825. Mixing historical fact and fiction, Neil McGoohan's The Iron Horse is a riveting account of how the very first railway in the world was funded and built.