Valley Press – serie

The unique collection of drawings, paintings and photographs that make up She Was A Hairy Bear, She Was A Scary Bear provide a loosely autobiographical account of creator Louisa Bermingham’s idiosyncratic relationship with the world.

Using her seemingly inconsequential but deeply resonant protagonist, created using her own hair, to explore themes of power, beauty, self-esteem, responsibility, acceptance, conformity, loneliness and happiness, she takes readers on a surprising, often humorous journey through contemporary womanhood.

Rare Birds creatively re-imagines the rich and gripping story of Holloway Prison through the voices of prisoners, staff and others connected to its history, in order to explore some of the injustices of the penal system during its first hundred years. Natalie Scott's meticulously researched, moving and lyrical poems bring to life well-known voices such as Ruth Ellis, Sylvia Pankhurst, Emily Wilding Davison and Edith Thompson, plus a host of lesser-known names, to tell Holloway’s story in a truly unique and fascinating way.Hear inmates at their most vulnerable moments: Ruth Ellis in the last few minutes as she stands at the scaffold describing her executioner; Edith Thompson believing she will be given a stay due to her pregnancy; Selina Salter on her return to prison after being recorded as a lunatic. Join in with rousing suffragette songs composed whilst in prison; hear the testimonies of hunger strikes and forcible feeding; and learn about the shocking differences in treatment shown towards 1st and 3rd division inmates.Despite Holloway Prison’s notoriety as a women’s prison, the poems voice women in roles other than that of criminal: there are social campaigners, comrades, as well as sisters, daughters, mothers, wives, lovers and companions. The collection explores many topics which are still just as relevant today: human rights, gender, sexuality, mental illness and socio-economic status, with some of the problems women faced in the 19th century being not so different from the issues they face now.

"Between My Country — and the Others —There is a Sea —But Flowers — negotiate between us —As Ministry."

—Emily Dickinson

As the world grapples with the tragic human cost of the global pandemic and its aftermath, the need for kindness and gratitude has become more important than ever. The Ministry of Flowers is in many ways a book for our times, one that offers hope in a changing world. The poems call into stark relief the brevity of human life, while also emphasizing the urgent need to connect with others and offer acts of kindness as a way of healing and moving forward.

Taking its title from an Emily Dickinson poem, the book explores how flowers, both real and metaphorical, are at the heart of a kinder world. With a strong ecological focus, the poems celebrate nature’s continual ministry in our lives and highlight the need to respect the ecosystems that sustain us. The Ministry of Flowers speaks eloquently to a post-pandemic society, one in which compassion as well as forgiveness (of both self and others) become the seeds of the gentler, fairer world we seek.

One-sentence blurb

In 1941, eighteen-year-old Lille Carrigan's ill-fated summer of romance, lust, and indiscretion sets her hurtling through the dark, towards events she never saw coming.

Short blurb

"Youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness." - F. Scott Fitzgerald

It's 1941, the last summer of American innocence, and eighteen-year-old Lillie Carrigan is desperate to love and be loved, to lose her virginity, to experience her life's great, epic romance. Preoccupied with whiskey and cigarettes, sex and Catholic guilt, Lillie unknowingly sets in motion events leading to death and estrangement from her two best friends.

A decade on, Lillie is still haunted by the ghosts of that summer. Did she act solely out of youthful naivety and adolescent jealousy? Or perhaps there were darker forces at work: grief, guilt, sexual assault, and the double standards of her strict religious upbringing. Searching for patterns and meaning in the events of that year, and anxious to understand the person she has become, Lillie reflects on the darkness of her tarnished youth and confesses her sins.

Long blurb

The Essence of an Hour is the debut novel from Susan Furber. Set in the summer of 1941, the story follows eighteen-year-old Lillie Carrigan as she experiences first love with her lifelong friend, Teddy McCalman. Bound together by shared experiences of early loss and grief, Lillie and Teddy spend their time drinking and smoking, clinging to each other and their intense romance. Desperate to lose her virginity, but held back by Catholic guilt, past assault, and the judgement of her best friend, Lara, Lillie battles with her sexual awakening and the double standards which come with it. She is intoxicated by the summer's heady mix of alcohol and pheromones, not realizing that the events she sets in motion will lead to anguish, trauma, and loss. Ten years on, Lillie recounts the story of that summer, confessing to the sins of her past.

The ideas behind The Essence of an Hour came from the author's own interest in the cyclical nature of trauma, and her effort to understand why ordinary people hurt each other, either intentionally or unintentionally. Susan's experience of being raised Catholic, and receiving a Catholic education, sparked her desire to explore the struggles of young women caught between sexuality and religion, the double standards they experience, and the burden of carrying secrets of assault and abuse. Though The Essence of an Hour has all the ingredients of a classic young adult novel, it is certainly not a story you have heard before. You won't find clichés, prom queens, or happy endings within its pages. The Essence of an Hour is an exquisite example of beautifully written literary fiction which will leave you reeling.

Produced by members of the Northern Short Story Festival Academy, this new anthology showcasing the range of talent in the North of England features work by Litro fiction editor Barney Walsh, author & critic Richard Smyth, and poet and academic Haleemah Alaydi. Twelve of the authors featured in this new work are graduates of the Northern Short Story Festival Academy programme, which developed the voices of twelve brand new short story writers based in the region. Features a foreword by Anna Chilvers.

A meticulous, loving tribute to the language, structure and themes of the Brontës’ own works, as de la Motte at times weaves the very words of their correspondence, novels and poems seamlessly into his lively narrative.Oblivion traces Branwell’s meandering journey across the north of England, from the Fells of the Lake District to the ocean cliffs of Scarborough, from the smoky streets of industrial Halifax to the windswept moors above Haworth, encountering such notables as Hartley Coleridge and Franz Liszt. Through him we meet poets, sculptors, booksellers, prostitutes, publicans, railway workers, farmers, manufacturers and clergymen; through his experiences we contemplate the ineffable but fleeting ecstasy of sex, the existence of God, the effects of drugs and alcohol and the nature of addiction itself, the desire for fame, and the bitter resentment of artists and intellectuals who feel unappreciated by an increasingly materialistic, mechanised society.This sprawling story is a moving, thought-provoking page-turner that seeks not only to understand the roots of Branwell Brontë’s tragic end but also to unearth the striking similarities of character between him and his now-famous sisters.

Bold, beautiful and spiky, Angela Readman’s stories are both magical and real. Following her acclaimed debut Don’t Try This at Home, in this new collection, she approaches the fairy tale with a scalpel. The Girls are Pretty Crocodiles reads like a love letter to girlhood and a ransom note to all the fairy tales we have been told. In her prize-winning work 'The Story Never Told', an illiterate woman sells fairy tales for a book she knows will never have her name on the cover. In 'What’s Inside a Girl', a class takes lessons on dating invisible girls.

Dark, funny and surreal, these stories explore, challenge and ultimately transform the traditional fairy tale narrative. Women learn to be origami, climb into swan skins, feed wolves, flip burgers and snog kelpies. In dazzling prose that remains matter-of-fact, these tales take to task the happy endings we have been sold.

Otherworldly, yet down to earth, The Girls are Pretty Crocodiles discovers the hidden voice in the stories we know and reveals the magic of working-class lives. These stories have teeth.

“Angela Readman’s stories have a compelling intimacy and gorgeous imagery, and are often deeply moving – highly recommended reading.” Alison Moore, author of Booker-shortlisted The Lighthouse

“Angela Readman’s subtly dark stories rip the covers from the everyday. She turns its innocents and introverts inside-out before us, meanwhile exposing secret rituals and Chinese-whispery legends from all our suffocating and self-contained neighbourhoods. Throughout this new collection, the other Angela – Carter – hangs on Readman’s shoulder as she creates an eerie new folklore for fraught times. These are the stories we always knew existed but were never brave enough to tell, even to ourselves.” Ashley Stokes, author of Gigantic, Unsung Stories, 2021

“A poetic recontextualising of fairy tales and folklore, The Girls Are Pretty Crocodiles manages to be both playful and dangerous, often in the same sentence. Readman deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as Kirsty Logan and Marina Warner, as one of the natural successors to Angela Carter.” Dan Coxon, author of Only The Broken Remain and editor of This Dreaming Isle

Amanda Nigh is on top of her game – crafting the internet’s next viral hits by day, losing herself in London nightlife by night. Then she meets Craig Merleau, a magnetic American hockey star with a mind as sharp as his shot. His strange, philosophical charm draws her in just as a mysterious digital virus begins to spread, infecting both machines and people.

As cities reel and reality itself starts to glitch, Amanda and Craig seem to be the only ones untouched. To stop the chaos, they will need to 'body check' some big questions: can love defy the laws of physics? And more pressingly – are they humanity’s last hope, or part of its undoing?

Some stories will do anything to get your attention...

In this thrilling and unflinching debut collection from a prize-winning writer, an eclectic group of characters struggles with the lure of the limelight. Attention Seekers is a tour-de-force of dark humour and social commentary, deconstructing what it means to take up space and be seen – and at what cost.

In 'Scandals of Christendom', a teenager escapes school gossip to hang out with a dead Tudor queen. In 'Just Be Yourself', a reality show applicant has a bitter axe to grind. And in 'Caturday', a spiralling woman weaponises her cat's internet fame to keep track of her ex. In Attention Seekers, characters are often unreliable and selfish but, amongst the often irreverent and bold premises, there's real heart and honesty.

Don't miss out on this exuberant collection of stories that refuses to pull any punches. Emma Brankin has established herself as a rising star in the literary world, and Attention Seekers is her unforgettable debut.

The Selected Poems of Bermudian poet Nancy Anne Miller traces the decades she has been writing about her homeland, with the use of image metaphor as her primary tool for revealing Bermuda’s complexities. Her choice of this technique is to consciously break apart linear intentional thinking or the masculine sentence as Woolf referenced.

For Miller, the use of image metaphor allows a poem’s meaning to radiate across the entire poem as one thing is reflected through another in a circular movement, hence preventing one final climatic interpretation. She states: “The island’s history cannot be written down in a straight line” – and sees this as a female-voiced way of being a poet, one that is inclusive, layered, and exploratory.

*

“These taut, image-dense poems provide (among other things) a kind of time-lapse record of Bermuda’s history, showing how ‘an entire empire hangs in the chintz curtain.’ Everyday life in Bermuda (and beyond) is evoked by a set of tensions – between the culture of taste, class, and propriety and the history of race, caste, and violence; between the sense of prized uniqueness and dulling isolation; between a sense of remoteness from the world and the exemplariness of the island-as-world. Nancy Anne Miller’s photographer’s eye links the silver tea service on the mahogany table to bucolic English village life, bustling American highways, and the sights, smells, and sounds of the Caribbean archipelago.”

Simon Lewis, editor of Illuminations: An International Magazine of Contemporary Writing, and author of White Women Writers and Their African Invention (2013), and British and African Literature in Transnational Context (2011), University Press of Florida

*'A love letter to a house, dream-seeded in books, haunted by place and past; a reverie memoir steeped in longing for a home away from home.' – Jeff Young, author of Ghost Town and Wild Twin *

Un rêve. Une maison. Un village. Une vie en France. In this richly-woven memoir of buying and restoring a village home in the Périgord, Catherine Cole explores the enduring allure of France, the dreams we project onto its verdant landscapes, and the literature, film and culture they continue to inspire. At the heart of the story is the house itself; its rooms, garden, and history revealing a quiet narrative of place, memory, and longing. For anyone who’s ever imagined a life elsewhere, this is a book about turning dreams into bricks and mortar.

What happens when a sarcastic, sexually-confused Yorkshire lass decides to outwalk her heartbreak on Spain’s most famous pilgrimage?

Armed with no training, a battered journal, and too much Sauvignon Blanc, Amy White stumbles her way across the Camino de Santiago, creating a brilliantly unfiltered account of the process; part grief memoir, part comedy of errors, part accidental spiritual awakening.

Between brutal blisters, obsessive crushes, and unexpected kindness from strangers, Amy discovers lessons in love, loss, and self-acceptance. Both hilarious and soul-stirring, this is a story for anyone who’s ever wondered if breaking down might just be the first step to breaking through.

What does love look like in life’s later chapters? In this tender, mischievous new collection, Zack Rogow answers with the hard-won wisdom of a man newly single in his senior years. From the awkward hilarity of reentering the world of romance, to the sweetness of new connections, to the lively chaos of grandchildren, these poems celebrate aging with humor, grace, and an open heart. With deep affection – for all that has gone, all that remains, and all that still lies ahead – Rogow reminds us that desire, intimacy, and joy are ageless companions.