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.…