Penned In The Margins: 6 books

Margins, edges and coastlines abound in John McCullough's tender, humorous explorations of contemporary life and love. Spacecraft navigates the white space of the page and the distance between people, encompassing everything from lichen to lava lamps, and from the etymology of words to Brighton's...

From the tip of Cornwall to the Isle of Mull, through rural communities and the inner-city, Amber Massie-Blomfield takes the road less travelled to discover Britain's most astonishing and unexpected theatres. A ruined playhouse, haunted halls, a stage hewn from granite cliffs. Theatres on wheels,...

Shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Prize, Ted Hughes Award and Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. Sunshine is the powerful new collection from Next Generation Poet Melissa Lee-Houghton. Continuing the stark confessional style that has garnered critical acclaim and a growing fanbase, Sunshine is at...

An escaped lion roams the streets of Essex; a lonely pensioner holds a tower block fête; and the silent majority takes to the streets. The second collection from one of the UK's best-known poets.

It is 2031 and the must-have gadget is the Holophin: a tiny, dolphin-shaped microprocessor which cures your worst impulses and phobias, comforts you in your grief or boredom and makes everything look much, much prettier. This hallucinatory and darkly funny sci-fi mystery is the debut novella by acclaimed poet Luke Kennard, a refracted meditation on identity, technology and the imagination.

An invisible mountain rises above the streets of London. At over 1,400 metres it's Britain's highest peak. This ingenious book is an account of the ascent of Mount London by writers, poets and urban cartographers, each scaling a smaller urban mountain from Crystal Palace to Parliament Hill. Mount...