Angela Readman

From fairy-tale gifts to gutter living, via your Mum becoming Elvis, Angela Readman's award-winning stories display Angela Carteresque magic

Don't Try This at Home

Friendship blossoms between an enigmatic girl and a whisky distiller's granddaughter on a remote Scottish island.

Something Like Breathing

Out of the doll's house and into the woods, Bunny Girls steps out of the shadows of girlhood and looks at the world with wide eyes. Surreal, spiky, wise and darkly funny, this new collection by Costa-winning author and poet Angela Readman expertly mixes shades of film noir, northern wit, and magic realism. Through the lens of childhood, these poems address autism, anxiety, and darker concerns buried by cultural ideals of femininity. Here in Readman's skilful words are odes to severed heads, angels and Disney villains, Marilyn Monroe's body double, squashed slugs, sexual awakenings, Wendy-houses and snow globes, nosebleeds and blackbirds. Women are both invisible and actively writing themselves into the visible. Where there is isolation and dislocation, its counterbalance is finding breathless, reckless joy in the acts of creation and imagination. At its heart, this enlivening, magnificent book is about darkness and light, the lovely and the frightening, the beautiful and the worrying.

Bunny Girls

The Book of Tides

Strip

Strip reveals the lives of 50's pin-up Bettie page, and hardcore porn stars of the following eras with stunning beauty and poignancy. These poems illuminate the darkest of places as they explore taboo with acute sensitivity from suburbia to cinema screen. These poems are cinematic, visual, hauntingly, beautiful and at times devastating.

Calum Kerr

Nuala Ni Chonchuir

Tim Stevenson

This, the 3rd annual anthology from National Flash-Fiction Day, sees a wide range of writers telling us their carefully crafted stories about the wonders of the world and beyond. Given the theme of 'The Senses' these writers have responded in unexpected ways to produce tales of love and betrayal, hope and despair, life and death. Writers include sci-fi and crime best-seller Michael Marshall Smith, crime novelist Sarah Hillary, Costa Short-Story Prize 2014 winner Angela Readman, NFFD Director Calum Kerr and a host of others including Nuala Ni Chonchuir, Nik Perring, Nigel McLoughlin, Cathy Bryant, Tim Stevenson, Tania Hershman and Jon Pinnock. This is a wonderful collection of stories, show-casing the vital state of flash-fiction today.

2014 National Flash-Fiction Day Anthology

Eating My Words

Jessica Andrews

Sean O'Brien

J. A. Mensah

Julia Darling

Crista Ermiya

Chrissie Glazebrook

Glynis Reed

Degna Stone

Margaret Wilkinson

The original Northern Powerhouse, Newcastle upon Tyne has witnessed countless transformations over the last century or so, from its industrial heyday, when Tyneside engineering and innovation led the world, through decades of post-industrial decline, and underinvestment, to its more recent reinvention as a cultural destination for the North. The ten short stories gathered here all feature characters in search of something, a new reality, a space, perhaps, in which to rediscover themselves: from the call-centre worker imagining herself far away from the claustrophobic realities of her day job, to the woman coming to terms with an ex-lover who’s moved on all too quickly, to the man trying to outrun his mother’s death on Town Moor. The Book of Newcastle brings together some of the city’s most renowned literary talents, along with exciting new voices, proving that while Newcastle continues to feel the effects of its lost industrial past, it is also a city striving for a future that brims with promise.

Angela Readman

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