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Harriet is a young hippopotamus who has always felt like an elephant. A gentle, engaging story about a young hippopotamus who has felt like an elephant as long as she can remember. She decides to ask the elephant herd if she can live with them, and be an elephant. She is accompanied by a chimp, a sandpiper and a giraffe, puzzled by her decision but who keep her company on her journey. The no-nonsense elephant matriarch simply informs her she had better "keep up", thus accepting her, and a small elephant walks beside her, as her animal friends wave goodbye and wish her well, and a small elephant walks beside her. Her animal friends wave goodbye and wish her well.

"Linguistically charged, rhythmically and technically assured, theatrically daring, this poetry collection restores mythical and historical female figures to the human imagination. The cast of characters includes Greek goddesses, an 18th Century Chines pirate, pilots in the WWII Serbian Night Bomber Regiment, black American golf and tennis pro, Althea Gibson, and photographer Khadija Saye, who died in the Grenfell fire. The poems are robust, playful, tender and compassionate. The work as a whole forms an unsentimental and richly detailed testament to women''s resistance. It bears witness, expressing and celebrating the life-force and capacity for love that defines each character and that we recognise as poetry''s authentic subject matter."Graham Mort"Unknown cracks on with its task of introducing and re-introducing us to women who might otherwise slip through history and culture''s ever wide female-shaped holes. Brisk and beautiful poems speed us from goddesses like Kore to semi-mythic figures like Cartimandua ("Lost Queen of the North" as I think of her) to real life women like Khadija Saye, a young artist who tragically died in the Grenfell fire. Works of reclamation like this are ongoingly necessary-which is frustrating-but when they''re done so well, are a pleasure and a joy." Kate Fox 

Poetry about the sudden, drastic changes wrought across the country due to Covid and lockdowns: British, but universal. "You will weep.. for/what you always assumed was real.../...places, comings and goings, meetings/and encounters, the uninhibited touch of others." from 'The New Rules to Abide By'"Beagrie's latest collection is recurringly good - recurringly catch-in-the-throat good. With expert twists and turns of language and emotion, he deftly makes us explore the layers of the pandemic's impact. From the punch-in-the-gut poignancy of 'On Touch', through a wonderful complexity of prose poems on our disturbed and disturbing times, this is a collection that will resonate long after Covid fades from our collective memory." - Char March"This collection chronicles the strange legend of the plague year - all distances, absences and grief - bursting with energetic presence, restlessly, defiantly embodied. The poems' diverse robust forms are as if each one were being tested to see if it can bear the weight of all that surreal sudden change. There is strength in such faithful truth-telling, even amid heartbreak, fracture and loss. Bob Beagrie finds words for the unsayable, to ask what will endure in our unknown future."- Linda France

Set against the Russian Revolution of 1905, a prelude to that of 1917, this novel explores the complexity of relationships and motivations that lead to acts of rebellion.As Anna finds new purpose to her life and falls in love, the violent struggle against the Tsar escalates. On 9 January 1905, a workers' protest is massacred by Tsarist soldiers

The King has been defeated and the spirit of the Mantra restored and Suni reunited with her father but all is not quite right. Then strangers arrive from the sea bringing hope for the town: but nothing is quite as it seems.

Starspin is a reflective collection which includes poems published in a wide range of leading magazines and journals including Carillon; Dream Catcher; Envoi; Labrys; Lunar Poetry; Manifold; Northwords Now; Orbis; Other Poetry;Poetry Monthly; Smiths Knoll; Stride; Tears in the Fence; The Journal; Ver; Wandering Dog. These poems are a reminder that all life comes at a price but that we should value that cost and the benefits that ensue. Barrasford Young''s poems are masterpieces of observation offering the reader a vivid landscape of poignant well-crafted poetry. His long time love of books and literature as a retired publisher and bookshop owner offers the reader a lens to see the world of wide experience. This poem from the book exemplifies his wry observation, empathy and descriptive skills:The unnecessary death of an otter cub in a new hydro scheme Dark hydro water turbines back to lightbehind my house.At its high intake a cub caughtin unnatural rock fights          concrete scours her cubsilk pelt concrete strips her skin to gut her bones break     her will fails in wild trapped waterthat should have buoyed hershe fought and did she not feel terrorat that slow closing of body,fear the dark clawsfingering through her eyes? She did not know of death,but felt something failand found no gentleness. Not being aware of extinctionmakes it no easier. "Barrasford Young is at his best with his sharp natural descriptions and recreation of scene and place."PaulineKirk, Editor, Fighting Cock Press 

Serpent Child  is the autobiography of Patricia Riley. It describes the life of a child of seperated parents in post war Britain at a time when children were still ‘seen but not heard’ and when even for married parents children were preferably seen somewhere else.Many children were hurried off to boarding schools, even at a very tender age; and, if they were noticed at all, children could become pawns in harmful, even dangerous parental war games. In an enlightening, at times humorous, and important book, Pat describes a past that is not always past.‘Children were once viewed as property for the most powerful parent usually the father. Much of the history of family law is the history of the emancipation of children.‘High Court judge Mrs Justice Parker once remarked how children were too frequently weaponised by their parents, and were ‘child soldiers in the separation war’. It has taken family courts and family justice professionals decades to deal with this chronic weaponising and to help children move into a demilitarised zone within or outside of their family.‘This is an important book about an issue that is rarely covered in such depth, and I wish it every success.’  Anthony Douglas CBE, Chief Executive of Cafcass, January 2019.Patricia Riley is the author of Looking for Githa, the biography of the ground-breaking playwright Githa Sowerby

A trilogy of poetic voices, encapsulating rage, angst, fearlessness and insistence on being heard. Each poet is poised on the edge of prominence, and brings her own vision of the world: how their elders have handed it on, and how they wish to see it remade. Becca shines light on the modern through a classical lens, focusing on 'dark goddesses' such as Inanna. She rages at senseless death-by-cop; but knows better than to "shout". Laura lobs sestinas at weapons of destruction: the silencing of women, reforming them into one's ideal, where controlling anything is better than controlling nothing. Izzy also writes about classical creatures: Anglo-Saxon monsters, Norse gods, or enraged statuary brought to life. She reminds us to be our true, unapologetic, murderous or sexy selves, in an earthy, steel-tipped set by a member of Generation "Snowflake".

Helena Hailstanes is sick of the secluded life her father, Sam, forces her to live on the shores of Loch Duie. She runs away and encounters Megan, who as a muddled and meddling young Sea Witch cursed Helena and Sam, creatures of an ancient race of shape-shifting otters, to remain in human form.

This intriguing detective story introduces DI Ambrose in the first of a series of tales of murder most foul. Foul Play happens in a fog bound theatre with a cast of eccentric actors to keep the reader engaged until the very last page. We also meet popular team members DS Waters and WPC Meadows for the first time This novel is the first cooperation by mother daughter duo Pauline Kirk and Jo Summers writing as PJ Quinn.Set in a partially bombed out theatre in the sleepy town of Chalk Heath where the leading lady is attacked on stage during a rehearsal. This is postwar austerity Britain, James Dean, Danny Kaye and Brian Rix are all the rage, yet in Chalk Heath, culture is represented by the Players. Ambrose and his team set about finding the killer.This was a time when forensic science was in its infancy and crime scene processing was primarily good observation with a bit of fingerprint analysis and blood typing thrown in to taste. For the crime novelist this period allows for good character development and greater freedom to explore the relationships between all the principals. Foul Play is an exemplary tale of high drama in a dramatic setting while Ambrose, who remembers the theatre in is prewar glory, and coping with his own wayward son, attempts to reconcile his younger self, his son;  the damaged theatre and acting troupe with the essential business of solving the crime.

Most of the world's major cities are inundated; a tsunami has wiped out houses, shops and schools along the Hartlepool shoreline. And now the authorities are walling in the flood zone…Seventeen-year-old Zoe, knocked unconscious during the sudden flood, cannot recall her name and can only summon flashes of her immediate past. Zoe meets Alma, who has a mysterious link to global entrepreneur  & opportunist Volk Volkov, himself a refugee: of his own past, and of a Soviet prison camp. But will Alma and Volk's drama trap Zoe in The Zone?The ancient past and possible future collide with Creationists, environmentalists, former prisoners, flood tourists and feral castaways in Eliza Mood's rollicking survival story set in the near future. O Man of Clay is a finely imagined and complex dystopian novel about an England of the future overwhelmed by environmental catastrophe. Like the best novels set in the future, this one is really about our miserable, dismal, toxic present and its message is salutary, prescient and terrifying.  The writing is also very, very good.Carlo Gébler, novelist