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.…