literature
Back Up North
by Ally Shepherd
After a decade overseas, Ally Shepherd got stuck in the Northwest of England amid 2020’s pandemic chaos. She promptly became a born-again Northerner and, probably annoyingly, wanted to tell the world.
Documenting her journey to understand herself through the region in which she grew up, she explores its pressing questions, such as: Is there still a North/South divide? Was she descended from a Pendle witch? Why does Liverpool have a slavery museum? What’s with Scouse and Geordie accents? Where are Northern women’s stories in TV, film, and literature? And is it okay to eat chips, cheese and gravy? (Spoiler: The answer to the last question is ‘yes’).
Drawing on history, politics, pop culture, and folklore – as well as a childhood in Cheshire, family stories from Lancashire, and an education in Yorkshire – Back Up North explores the region’s diverse legacy of food, music, literature, dialect, social change and superstition. Give it a read, pet. Tha might learn summat.
Lost in Spain
In the Footsteps of Laurie Lee
By Dave Hadfield
It was the Booker Prize-winning author of Schindler’s Ark, Thomas Keneally, who described Dave Hadfield as ‘The Poet of Rugby League’. True enough, though the man who has also been called Bolton’s answer to Bill Bryson has equally revelled in other subjects, like music and travel.
Lost in Spain is the result of the dying wish of his oldest friend’s wife, Barb, to have her ashes scattered along the route traced by Laurie Lee when he walked from Gloucestershire to the Mediterranean in the 1930s.
That original journey provided the material for As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, the book upon which, as well as Cider with Rosie, Lee’s glittering reputation rests.
Lost in Spain is a story of friendship and late-flowering love that is by turns informative, poignant, elegiac and laugh-out-loud funny.
These days freed from the constraints of daily journalism, Hadfield has no plans to stop writing. Of his ten books so far, five have been written since he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease in 2008.
