I’ve always thought that George Mallory’s raison d’etre for taking on the onerous burden of Everest’s North Face lacked gravitas; intended to convey an existential compulsion, his now-seminal phrase - ‘because it’s there’ - is inexpressive, listless, inadequate to the task of embodying a matter, quite literally, of life and death.

They’re back, The Thursday Murder Club! The residents of Cooper’s Chase Retirement Village. Elizabeth, Joyce, Ron and Ibrahim are on the trail of the baddies once more and, as ever, are aided by Chris and Donna and of course, Bogdan, among others. The familiarity is comforting, like a cup of cocoa on a winter’s day. It’s a new puzzle but you know you’re surrounded by helpful friends.

When I Land in Northern Ireland When I land in Northern Ireland I long for cigarettes, for the blue plume of smoke hitting the lung with a thud and, God, the quickening blood as the stream administers the nicotine. Stratus shadows darkening the crops when coming in to land, coming in to land.

To read Bill Manhire’s poetry is to be lulled, with an ironic lack of effort, into a landscape that is loaded with sense and meaning for the poet’s narrator(s), but perceived as gently out-of-kilter by the charmed observer.

Harrogate International Festivals today announced the 18 titles longlisted for the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award 2026, the UK and Ireland’s most prestigious crime fiction award, now in its twenty second year.

Simon Armitage’s ‘The Moon and the Zoo’ explores the enduring connection between wildlife and people in honour of conservation charity’s anniversary British Poet Laureate Simon Armitage has written a major new poem celebrating wildlife - and the responsibility we all have to protect it - to mark the 200th anniversary of international conservation charity ZSL.

In Passing How swiftly the strained honey of afternoon light flows into darkness and the closed bud shrugs off its special mystery in order to break into blossom: as if what exists, exists so that it can be lost and become precious Lisel Mueller’s poem of natural evanescence is rendered with a delicacy that befits a barely perceptible transitioning of forms.

Thirlmere After we lit the last candle the gales couldn't hold us any more. Along the lanes the walls had begun to slump, water sluicing through them green as grass, but we drove through anyway and out into the valley. The fields were polished flat. Trees were hung with drooping ropes of fleece that caught the breeze like kudzu.

Liam Hughes’ wonderful new take on the medical profession as viewed from the assured, if not patrician, perspective of an informed backward glance corroborates at least one long-held suspicion: that its staff, because permanently beleaguered, are amongst the most sardonic of humourists.

She has worked alongside British intelligence, been befriended — and duped — by a real spy, and watched her government blow up buildings in the Welsh countryside. Now, with her latest thriller, The Hiding Season, Ava Glass is bringing the shadowy world of espionage to Yorkshire.

Dance of the Stream Sprite Shuffle through the shady shallows, Leap from log to log, Tango past the tangled brambles, Tiptoe round the bog. Skipping, stepping, pirouetting where the minnows teem; I’m dancing to the mesmerizing music of the stream. Balance over broken branches, Limbo under bridges, Twist and turn through murky tunnels, Samba with the midges.

A Winter Night It was a chilly winter's night; And frost was glittering on the ground, And evening stars were twinkling bright; And from the gloomy plain around Came no sound, But where, within the wood-girt tow'r, The churchbell slowly struck the hour; As if that all of human birth Had risen to the final day, And soaring from the worn-out earth Were called in hurry and dismay, Far away…

This novel is based on the Salem Witch Trials, a tragic period of American history. It is made all the more personal because the author, Kathleen Kent, is a direct descendant of Martha Carrier who was accused of being a witch, tried and ultimately put to death.

The Only English Kid When the debate got going on ‘Englishness’, I’d pity the only English kid – poor Johnny in his spotless Reeboks and blue Fred Perry.

Ends At my end of the earth the Atlantic began. On good days trawlers were flecks far out, at night the green waves were luminous. Gulls were the birds that gobbled my crusts and the air in my bedroom was salty. For two weeks once a whale decayed on the pale beach while no one swam. It was gelignite that cleared the air. The uses of village carpenters were many.

Ground Gives Bauman’s Tetley lecture on his Liquid Modernity, how free-floating anxiety is our condition now, brought Heaney’s ‘Anything Can Happen’ to mind, its phrase ‘Ground gives’. Anybody who stepped on an icy pool, believing it strong enough to hold their weight, discovers liquid modernity’s meaning in a gut-churning rush as knowledge swamps faith.

‘That’s the thing about murder. It’s all fun and games until it happens to you.’ The blurb attracted me to this novel, given that it said it was set in Ludlow, a very pretty market town in Shropshire where I lived for a few years. An unusual and somewhat rural setting for a murder, I thought, until I saw the heading of the first chapter: Ludlow, Kansas. Ah!

Stories of the treatment of Allied prisoners-of-war by their Japanese captors in the Eastern theatres of the second world war would have fallen on deaf ears at my secondary school in the late sixties. Blindsided to the suffering of others by a tendency to self-obsession, there was little scope for empathy in the annals of preoccupied juvenilia.

And Then the Sun Broke Through A sea of jade and muscatel; the sky, gun-metal. Landward, the storm-portending birds, white-lit, Riding wild contours of wind, uplift  To tilt at the raucous crows. This Is how it is to live, the ticker tells, Looping the floor of the newsfeed.  Somewhere, an outrage; an airstrike; Somewhere, a politic withdrawal.

The etymology of words plays much more than a passing role in Jayant Kashyap’s award-winning new collection for Poetry Business: his journey into the katabatic underworld of ritual and cultural observance is illuminated, at every turn, by recourse to the guideposts of language.

How wonderful to celebrate success! This novel opens with a family travelling by train back from London, having visited The Great Exhibition of 1851. Celebrating all things industrial, it was ‘a triumph of Great Britain’, organised at the behest of Prince Albert. The Fletcher family are on the train, returning to their home in Birmingham.

It’s a very long time since I read a book of poetry, a whole book, that is, in one sitting. What a confession for this retired English teacher! But when this book arrived through the letterbox, I was curious.

River Mother O the sideways fullness of crab heavy chassis low-slung on the riverbed she is a teeming mass clawed boat tip her a bit to spot the freight her pouch clutched pearls and now she seethes with crablets of tininess writhing spiderlings little sparkles in a battered jewel case rich crustacean mama multiply blessed Potamonautes perlatus Madonna multitudinous you are an ove…