Wrecking Ball Press – förlag

This slice of kitchen sink noir tells Dunbar’s story in print for the very first time. Featuring a cast of real and imagined characters, it is the result of four years’ painstaking research that has unearthed the hidden story of one of the North’s most enigmatic figures. It is a tale of the North / South divide and reveals how a shy teenage girl defied the circumstances she was born into to become one of West Yorkshire’s greatest dramatists.

Set in the Thatcher era, it maps the extraordinary rise of a young woman from the Buttershaw estate, who is discovered via a Women’s Aid refuge. She is propelled into the London theatre establishment and an adapted screenplay of two of her early plays brings her wealth, accolades and notoriety, while raising three young children.

Rita, Sue and Bob Too! was a national scandal upon its release, and its tagline ‘Thatcher’s Britain with Her Knickers Down’ ensures it is a box office sensation. Fame brings anxiety however, and Dunbar is unable to cope with the media attention, pressures of family life and writer’s block. She slowly succumbs to the pitfalls of drink and spends her last days in her local pub The Beacon, where she completes her final script based on a gang of unscrupulous debt collectors. In 1990, aged 29, she collapses from a fatal brain haemorrhage.

One of the most important writers of her generation, this remarkably stubborn ‘genius straight from the slums’ recorded the everyday realities of working-class life in the North of England. Dunbar’s unflinching autobiographical plays included themes of domestic violence, underage sex, poverty, racism, alcoholism and the declining status of men. By using frank and expletive-ridden dialogue she created a no-holds-barred account of the underclass composed in the tradition of social realism.

J SS Bach is the story of three generations of women from either side of Germany’s 20th Century horror story - one side, a Jewish family from Vienna, the other linked to a ranking Nazi official at Dachau concentration camp - who suffer the consequences of what men do. Fast forward to 1990s California, and two survivors from the families meet.Rosa is a young Australian musicologist; Otto is a world-famous composer and cellist. Music and history link them. A novel of music, the Holocaust, love, and a dog.The author’s writing is a wonderland, captivating and drawing the reader in to the presented world. Time becomes no object as a literary universe unfolds and carries the reader through eighty years, where emotions are real and raw and beautifully given.

Dean Wilson: Hull’s fourth best and Withernsea’s second best poet, daily collector of pebbles and an enigma wrapped in rhyme. Since his relocation to a cliff-edge residence, Dean’s creative juices have been flowing faster than the Humber into the North Sea and, inspired by his Holderness surroundings, he’s been writing furiously. Take Me Up The Lighthouse is the result. Open up and enter the wonderful world of Mr Wilson.

Psychomachia reads like an NA meeting with Donna Tartt, Joan Didion, DBC Pierre, James Frey, Angela Carter, Reinaldo Arenas, Virginia Despentes and JT Leroy battling their collective consciousness. Literature like this is usually presented through the male gaze, hence the fashion and rock n roll literati naming Kirsty Allison London’s finest.

She’s hilarious – she’s fucked up. Scarlet Flagg is so wasted, she doesn’t know if she killed the arch patriarch of rock n roll, Malachi Wright of Wright States International Touring after he raped her at a festival at 14. Scarlet is the kinda girl you wanna help, fuck, and leave. But is she dangerous? Did she murder Malachi or was it her boyfriend, Iggy Papershoes, frontman of Heroshima? Or perhaps her drug-dealing father? Scarlet doesn’t remember – she hardly remembers her own name.

This is brutal female drug-lit at its finest. The first novel of the real nineties, Scarlet is an unreliable narrator of epic fin-de-millennia proportions floating in a Shoreditch-warehouse haze. Her fast moving chronicle of the secret drug-filled, love starved, sex satiated-nightmare world of East End fashion, art and music afterparties is set in an era before MeToo, when stigmas meant keeping schtum, and getting in with the male-dominated in-crowd relied on copious amounts of class-As. Like Jean Genet in a prison cell, without camera phones, social media or mental health awareness, Scarlet searches for redemption in the pursuit of revenge through blurred lines in Ibiza, Paris, London and New York.

The Ormering Tide is a coming of age story set amidst a series of darkly foreboding events. Rozel lives with her triplet older brothers and her parents in the bay of a small island. One of her brothers goes missing and the family’s landlord, Mr Willow, is implicated as the menacing truths are discovered. The island is rich with nature; and the islanders’ lives and the steady passing of the seasons contrast sharply with the realities of violence and inevitable revelations. The Ormering Tide explores the inherent human need to keep – and bury – secrets.

Kathryn Williams’ first novel, The Ormering Tide, is about processing the past, after the fact. This is a brooding and astonishing debut from the Mercury Music Prize nominated singer-songwriter.

The Ormering Tide shines as brightly as the beautiful shell from which this novel draws its title and is as impressive and adventurous as the author’s music.

An eclectic collection of poems from the unique perspective of a poet who has spent much of his life at the hard edge of education.

These poems reflect the emotions and experience of being a teacher as well as the thoughts and feelings about everything that externally impinges on the role of educators. While the collection will have broad appeal to fellow practitioners, it will also resonate with anyone and everyone who has attended school.

Mike Ferguson’s poems about teaching and examining were written over a 30 year period as an English teacher, and over 35 years as an examiner of English Literature at GCSE level. The eclecticism comes not only from reflecting over a long period of time but, more pertinently, on a varying focus of style and the experiences themselves.

Ferguson’s most recent writing is almost exclusively ‘experimental’ in vein. A small core of poems are sonnets. A number of poems air the poet’s political and critical views on education.

A little after the Berlin Wall falls and the ‘Eastern Bloc’ realises it’s not a ‘Bloc’ and it isn’t particularly ‘Eastern’, misunderstandings multiply. As the world begins to transition into chaos, a new serial killer threatens the city. But the reluctant detective isn't engaged. No one is telling the truth. Not even him.

This is a comedy and a tragedy, a search for identity and a thriller. The Pumpkin Season is about poetry and intellectual property and is for readers who want to enjoy themselves and those who don’t.

Maisie is 31 and weighs 33 stone – that’s 2 stone lighter than when she had to be winched from her window by crane, in a bariatric rescue. An irrepressible force of nature, Maisie is upbeat, funny and self-deprecating. Now after 2 months in Brighton General Hospital she’s being discharged, on a new diet and once again able to walk short distances with the aid of a stick.

Maisie’s landlady has used her hospital stay as the excuse to evict her. Fortunately though, after several weeks of every official body dodging responsibility, her “social wonder” has found her a new flat. It’s in a shabby house conversion near the seafront. As well as the partial sea view, Maisie is excited about finally having neighbours. She hopes it will be like the TV show ‘Friends’.

A collection of poetry in translation from Lidija Dimkovska, a poet and novelist from North Macedonia living in Slovenia. Born in 1971, Lidija writes in Macedonian. She has published six books of poetry, three novels, one American diary and one collection of short stories which have been awarded and translated into 15 languages (English, German, Polish, Hungarian, Slovak, Czech, Romanian, Serbian, Slovenian, French, Croatian, Italian, Albanian, Bulgarian and Latvian). She has participated at numerous international literary festivals (Princeton Poetry Festival, Stockholm, Rotterdam, Sarajevo, Belgrade, Vilnius, Manchester, Chicago, Zagreb, Vilenica, Medana, Struga, Leipzig, Lido Adriano, Manchester, Kazan, Dresden, Taipei, Cork, Warsaw, Berlin, etc.) and was a writer-in-residence in London, Berlin, Iowa, Vienna, Graz, Salzburg, Krems, Tirana, and Split.

“Exemplary and haunting, Lidija Dimkovska, who is one of the leading writers of south-east Europe, writes like no-one else. In this Selected Poems (from both of her last books), impeccably translated, we hear the gritty edge to her intelligent compassion, the way she interweaves fantasy and bitter experience, and how her searching poetic gaze hunts down difficult truths. Every one of these poems is a challenge we should rise to.” - Fiona Sampson

“These poems display courage and resilience, they are honest and uncompromising, characteristics that have always been present in the poetry of Lidija Dimkovska.” - Goce Smilevski, writer and literary researcher at the Institute of Macedonian Literature, Skopje.

“I think there are things going on in your sister that nobody knew anything about.”

“There are in everyone.”

1974. Teenage siblings Ellie and Colin are on holiday when they fall for the same girl. From this strange meeting onward, Ellie’s musical talent takes her to new heights, Colin finds his own fascination in photography, and both seem set for fulfilment – until catastrophe overtakes Ellie and changes the shape of the whole family.

Years later, brother and sister must battle to understand what has befallen them.

The Lightman System will speak directly to those who have had similar experiences to Ellie and Colin, either as the sufferer of mental storms or those close to them.

A wilfully ridiculous and thoroughly heartfelt travel memoir. Cycling Proficiency: the road to recovery is 4,500 miles of European pedal-mania with a crazy twist. The twist is that Alice Lushington is crazy. Not ‘cute’ crazy, not ‘bohemian’ crazy but bog standard, where-are-the-sandwiches-at-this-picnic crazy.

'I want to help people. I want somebody who is troubled to come across my story and realise the wild wonder beyond the horizon of recovery.It is not a technical or pretentious book but one written precisely from my heart to yours, the reader put snuggly in my scruffy pink trainers and taken with me: through the highs, lows, deserts and mountains, underneath lightning, away from dogs and handsome French boys (but always towards recovery).'It’s raw, it’s real, it’s excruciatingly honest about the darker shades of my life, however the dominant flavour of Cycling Proficiency is naïve fun and wacky humour. There's one more big twist too: each chapter begins with a hand-drawn pencil illustration of some of the places, characters and scenes from my saga.'