The living and the dead are working side by side in John Challis’s dramatic debut collection, The Resurrectionists. Whether in London’s veg and meat markets, far below the Dartford Crossing, or on the edge of the Western world, these poems journey into a buried and sometimes violent landscape to locate the traces of ourselves that remain. Amidst the political disquiet rising from the groundwater, or the unearthing of the class divide at the gravesides of plague victims, the veil between th...

A modern dramatisation of Dracula performed by a full cast 'in the dark'.

Former lovers Pam and Merv open a cyber section in their Vodka and Veggie Café in this BBC comedy seriesWhen Merv and Pam got divorced, that should have been the end of their relationship. But here they are, trying to turn a veggie-and-vodka bistro in a cyber cafe, while Merv is still living in Pam's front garden in a small caravan.Merv's dreams of being a rock star failed a long time ago, so the Cyber Pass is now his only hope - although his customers main...

Melville’s epic tale of one man versus a great white whale will delight Melville devotees as well as those who have yet to sail on this adventure in this mesmerizing new recording read by Jonathan Epstein.The mountain whose whale-like shape first gave Melville the idea of writing Moby Dick rests in the Berkshire Hills, Massachusetts, a short drive away from The Alison Larkin Presents recording studio. “I’d been wanting to produce Moby Dick ever since I moved to Western Massachusett...

Between my finger and my thumbThe squat pen rests; snug as a gun.-- from 'Digging'With its lyrical and descriptive powers, Death of a Naturalist marked the auspicious debut of one of the century's finest poets.

Calming, thought-provoking, poetic and honest**, Notes from Walnut Tree Farm** is a collection of writing and musing by documentary-maker, environmentalist and author of Waterlog, Roger Deakin.'Gentle, straight, honest, inquisitive, funny, melancholic' Spectator'A lovely book that is a poignant epitaph to a remarkable individual' Amazon Review________________For the...

Read this meditative and inspiring diary of Derek Jarman's famous garden at Dungeness, which is also a powerful account of his life as an HIV positive man in the 1980s.In 1986 Derek Jarman discovered he was HIV positive and decided to make a garden at his cottage on the barren coast of Dungeness.Facing an uncertain future, he nevertheless found solace in nature, growing all manner of plants. While some perished beneath wind and sea-spray others flourished, ...

From his life’s work so far, spanning more than four decades, Les Murray has selected these 100 poems, his personal best. Including classics such as ‘The Broad Bean Sermon’, ‘An Absolutely Ordinary Rainbow’ and ‘The Dream of Wearing Shorts Forever’, this elegant hardback is guaranteed to delight Murray fans and introduce new readers to his work. This is a wonderful gift, and a treasure trove of the best poems ever written in Australia.‘No poet has ever travelled like this, whether ...

** LONGLISTED for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize 2018 **M. John Harrison is a cartographer of the liminal. His work sits at the boundaries between genres – horror and science fiction, fantasy and travel writing – just as his characters occupy the no man’s land between the spatial and the spiritual. Here, in his first collection of short fiction for over 15 years, we see the master of the New Wave present unsettling visions of contemporary urban Britain, as well as supernatural par...

A warm, witty memoir of one man’s escape from the city in an unlikely quest to create out of a mountainous Welsh landscape a garden fit for inclusion in the prestigious Yellow Book – the ‘Gardens of England and Wales Open for Charity’ guide – in just one year.It was a derelict smallholding so high up in the Black Mountains of Wales it was routinely lost in cloud. But to Antony Woodward, Tair-Ffynnon was the most beautiful place in the world.Equally ill-at-ease in town and c...

A book of stories all about why books mean the world to usWhy are books, in all their forms, so very powerful?What do the books we've read over our lives—our own personal libraries—make of us?What does the unravelling of our tradition of public libraries, so hard-won but now in jeopardy, say about us?The stories in Ali Smith's new collection, The Library and Other Stories, are about what we do with books and what they do with us: ho...

The wilderness is much closer than you think. Passed through, negotiated, unnamed, unacknowledged: the edgelands - those familiar yet ignored spaces which are neither city nor countryside - have become the great wild places on our doorsteps.In the same way the Romantic writers taught us to look at hills, lakes and rivers, poets Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts write about mobile masts and gravel pits, business parks and landfill sites, taking the reader on a journey to marve...