Ruby Speechley, "Someone Else's Baby"

 

Ruby Speechley is a bestselling psychological thriller writer, whose titles include Missing, Gone, Guilty, and The Uninvited Guest. Her debut, Someone Else's Baby, was re-published by Boldwood Books in July 2025. Stolen will be her ninth novel, out in November 2025. Known for their twisty plots, relatable characters and gripping suspense, Ruby's books explore domestic issues involving trust, secrets, confessions, parenting and betrayal, alongside crimes such as abduction, blackmail, online surveillance, social media danger and murder. Born in Lisbon, Portugal, Ruby came to the UK as a baby and was raised here by her English father and Portuguese mother. She moved to Cheshire during lockdown in 2020 with her husband and two of her three children (and two Springer spaniels) to be near her eldest son, daughter-in-law and two grandchildren. You can contact her on X: @rubyspeechley, Facebook: Ruby Speechley Author, Instagram: rubyjtspeechley, Blue Sky: rubyspeechley.bsky.social.

About Someone Else's Baby, by Ruby Speechley

She gave away her children. Now she wants them back.

Charlotte Morgan knows how it feels to desperately want a baby. As a child, seeing her mum devastated by losing her longed-for babies, Charlotte wished another woman could give her mother what she so craved.

Now Charlotte's a mum herself, and knowing how much love her daughter, Alice, brings into her life, she vows to help others achieve their dreams of becoming a parent.

When she meets Malcolm and Brenda on a surrogacy website, it seems that she's found the perfect couple. In their late forties, they have wealth and a enviable life, but there's just one thing missing: a child of their own.

When Charlotte falls pregnant with twins, the couple are overjoyed. And while Charlotte's heart breaks as she hands them over, her reward is knowing how much happiness the two tiny babies are going to bring into their life.

But are Malcolm and Brenda all they seem? As secrets become unravelled, Charlotte is forced to face that she has handed her babies over to virtual strangers. And when Malcolm and Brenda disappear without a trace, Charlotte is plunged into a frantic search for the babies she carried - before it's too late ...

You can read more about Someone Else's Baby on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an extract from the novel. 

From Someone Else's Baby

Prologue

She’s running as hard as she can on this cold blustery night, gasping and coughing, straining to breathe. No coat or jumper, only a torn summer dress and canvas shoes with not enough grip so she slips and stumbles towards the edge of the cliff. The black water shimmers hungrily, thundering over the pebbles as the sea comes in, rattling them like a thousand bones as it draws out again.

You call to her over and over, but she doesn’t stop, doesn’t look back because she knows you’re catching her up. And when you do, you thrust your fist into her back. She falls into the night, her screams echoing around you. The thud of her landing on cold, solid rocks makes you shut your eyes for a second.

A light illuminates the tiny sunroom of a cottage down on the beach. Someone is standing at the window, watching you run away.

Jayne Stanton, "Have they marked you with arrows?"

 

Jayne Stanton’s poems have appeared in print and online at Anthropocene, Ink, Sweat & Tears, London Grip, Pennine Platform, Skylight 47, The Amphibian, Under the Radar and other print and online magazines and anthologies. Her first pamphlet, Beyond the Tune, was published by Soundswrite Press in 2014. She has written commissions for a county museum, University of Leicester’s Centre for New Writing, UoL poems for International Women’s Day 2018, and a city residency. Jayne runs Soundswrite, an East Midlands network for women who are enthusiastic about all aspects of poetry. Her latest pamphlet, Have they marked you with arrows?, is newly published by Poetry Space. 

 

About Have they marked you with arrows?, by Jayne Stanton
This strongly narrative and deeply personal body of work is the poet's creative response to living with uncertainty following her diagnosis and treatment for primary breast cancer. The poems give voice to the cancer patient's lived experience and its psychological and emotional legacy. 

The opening poem is a swift dispensing with the "journey" word, though a journey this undoubtedly is. The poems are unapologetic in their honesty, defiant in their asking of questions to which there are no easy answers, and naming and shaming those oft-pedalled platitudes. Hope is to be found waiting in the wings, still learning its lines when it takes the stage.

You can read more about Have they marked you with arrows? on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read two sample poems from the collection. 

From Have they marked you with arrows?

Many-feathered 

Hope is a scalpel in a steady hand.

There’s a point, somewhere

along an incision from axilla to areola

where Hope (who doesn’t know the lyrics) 

starts humming the tune on a loop.

The patient is too far under 

to appreciate the sentiment.

Hope is an evicted ductal carcinoma, 

the rose that grows 

in a pathologist’s petri dish.

Hope has clear margins. 

To what’s left, it delivers

high-energy beams from a linear accelerator.

Ten Things Worth Knowing about the MA in Creative Writing at the University of Leicester

Here are a few things you might want to know about our acclaimed MA in Creative Writing at the University of Leicester: 

1. You can find information about the course and apply for it online here. If you want more detailed information, or to talk about the course, email Jonathan Taylor on jt265@le.ac.uk. We're happy to answer any questions you might have! As regards entrance requirements, we ask for EITHER a first degree in a relevant subject OR significant writing experience (which we can discuss in advance). We have students from a huge range of different academic and literary backgrounds. You don't need to have studied Creative Writing as a university subject prior to applying. Mature students are very welcome.

2. As a creatively and intellectually challenging course, the MA will encourage you to experiment across forms and genres. It covers all the major forms, including prose fiction, creative non-fiction, poetry and script-writing. There are dedicated strands on fiction and poetry, so everyone will write some fiction and poetry during the MA. This is because you learn about key aspects of craft by experimenting in these forms which apply across all kinds of writing. There are also thematised strands, which cross between forms and genres (see below). Within certain parameters, you can choose what form you want to submit for assignments. So the MA aims to strike a balance between encouraging you to experiment, on the one hand, and allowing you (gradually) to specialise, on the other. Students on the MA have written poetry, short fiction, longer-form fiction, prose poetry, screenplays, radio dramas, theatre scripts, memoir, creative non-fiction, fantasy, science fiction, romantic comedies, stand-up ... and lots more. 

3. The MA deals with all aspects of this fascinating subject, moving between craft-based skills, research and academic skills and vocationality. Of course, in practice these things overlap, but the modules are designed to cover different key aspects of the subject: EN 7040 Research Methods in Creative Writing with the academic and research-based elements of Creative Writing (e.g. where ideas might come from, etc.); EN 7042 Applications with the professional and vocational aspects of the subject (e.g. publishing, performance, editing); EN 7041 Styles and EN 7043 Substances with the craft and workshop-based aspects (including writing poetry and prose fiction, alongside trans-generic themes, such as "Memory," "Time," "Life / Climate / Writing," "Space" - the themes vary each year); and finally the module EN 7044 Dissertation in Creative Writing gives you the time and space to specialise in your own chosen area. 

4. If you are doing the full-time course, you will take two modules per semester, and then the final dissertation from May to mid-September. If you are take the part-time route, you will do one module per semester over two years, and then the dissertation in the second year, ending mid-September. You can see term dates here. 

5. All MA Creative Writing students are provided with a personal tutor and, for the final Dissertation in Creative Writing, an individual supervisor who will guide you through the process and meet with you regularly. 

6. You receive detailed and helpful feedback on your work throughout the course from both tutors and fellow students. The MA is a supportive community of writers. 

7. Seminars generally consist of various elements, including discussion of specific themes and reading, writing exercises, feedback and workshopping. 

8. The very basic contact time is 2 hours a week during term time for each module. This means that, if you are full-time, basic contact time is 4 hours a week, if part-time, 2 hours per week. On top of this, there are all sorts of other things going on round the course, including guest lectures by visiting writers and writing professionals, performances, readings, Literary Leicester Festival, and so on. You will also meet regularly with your personal tutor. 

9. On the MA, you will be part of a vibrant wider community of writers and the Centre for New Writing at the University of Leicester. This community includes undergraduate and postgraduate students, graduates, staff, along with writers and writing professionals from across the UK and beyond. We run two blogs - Creative Writing at Leicester and our popular book review blog Everybody's Reviewing. Students regularly contribute to both. You can also join our big Facebook group, Creative Writing at Leicester University, which features news, writing opportunities, jobs, and calls for submissions. For a sense of some of the fantastic things our students and graduates have achieved, have a look at our regular News posts on this blog. 

10. The MA is taught by experienced writers and academics, including Kit de Waal, Zalfa Feghali, Felicity James, Jonathan Taylor and Harry Whitehead. Every year, we also programme a series of guest speakers from the professional writing world, who come in to talk about their own experiences in (for instance) publishing, writing, teaching, journalism, agency, etc.

Do let us know if you want to know more! Email jt265@le.ac.uk if you have any questions. 

Jo Bell, "Boater: A Life on England's Waterways"

Jo Bell, photo by Lee Allen

Jo Bell is an award-winning poet, writer, and archaeologist whose collections include Kith and Navigation. She was the UK's inaugural Canal Laureate and is a former director of National Poetry Day. Originally from Sheffield and raised on the edges of the Derbyshire Peak District, she has spent the past twenty years living a life afloat on the waterways of England. She can usually be found on a mooring somewhere in Cheshire. Boater is her first memoir.

About Boater, by Jo Bell
After decades of calm aboard England’s historic canals, a turbulent relationship finds Jo Bell embark on a year-long odyssey navigating the country’s canals. Exploring the past and present, Boater is both her story and the story of the living waterways – told with wit, wisdom, and deep insight into a culture found on the other side of the map.

In this beautifully crafted memoir, Jo uses her experience as an archaeologist to guide readers through this floating world. Along the way, there is heartbreak, disaster, a particularly grisly episode involving a Canada goose, biscuits, and an array of unforgettable and curious

characters.

She also highlights the importance of key historical figures who shaped the system we know today – James Brindley, Thomas Telford, L. T. C. Rolt – whose groundbreaking work revolutionised and revitalised transportation in England.

You can read more about Boater on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the memoir. 

From Boater
This is an adventure story. The adventure is a small one, and the country in which it happens is not on the usual map, because the place where I live is not on your map. It sits inside a parallel geography, on a map-within-a-map of England and Wales. It requires you to look differently at the land you live in. Its history, too, is a history-within-a-history; a rival to the chronicles of great men whose monuments are columns, and whose homes were themselves monuments. This watery nation is an idiosyncratic country, which inspires a love of place without nationalism.

Its people include ordinary workers, clowns, freaks, and charlatans. All share a sense of self, time, and purpose, which makes their world different to the one that lies ten feet away, beyond the water’s edge. I have not crossed the Atlantic in a dinghy with nothing but a jar of peanut butter and a waterproof hat. I have not scaled Everest, or rescued a friend from a crevasse by cutting off my own leg. But then, adventure is not a question of scale. What I have done is travel the waterways of England (and sometimes Wales) for twenty years, meeting with extraordinary people in an extraordinary environment. I have learned a lot about human nature, including my own; about rope, and Brasso, and bravery; and above all, about the necessity for a constant supply of biscuits.

Summer News 2025

Our last News post was back in April. You can read it here. Since then, lots has been happening in the Centre for New Writing in the University of Leicester, so here is an update on student and staff news. Congratulations and thanks to everyone who helps make this such a vibrant place to be!

 

General News from the Centre for New Writing

Above all, we're sad to announce that Nick Everett, Associate Professor of American Literature and Creative Writing, has now taken early retirement from the University. Nick has worked at the University of Leicester for thirty-four years. He has been the cornerstone of Creative Writing, and its founder as a subject here. He introduced the original MA options in Creative Writing, undergraduate modules, and the PhD programme. His contribution to the University and to students over the years has been immeasurable. It goes without saying that he will be hugely missed by students, graduates and staff alike. He will continue as an Honorary Fellow at the University. He will also be continuing his work as co-editor of the hugely successful New Walk Editions. Thank you for everything, Nick!

Our acclaimed MA in Creative Writing is still open for late applications for October 2025. You can find information and apply here. For more detailed information, or to talk about the course, email Jonathan Taylor on jt265@le.ac.uk. 

This blog, Creative Writing at Leicester, has recently passed 450,000 readers, while our review blog, Everybody's Reviewing, has now had over 700,000 readers. Thank you to everyone - reviewers, readers, editors, authors, interviewers, interviewees - involved!

The Centre for New Writing, in conjunction with Everybody's Reviewing, recently ran its first ever student Book Review Competition. The competition was open to all undergraduate and postgraduate students in the School of Arts, Media & Communication at the University of Leicester. Congratulations to all the winning entries, from Lee Wright (1st prize), Mellissa Flowerdew-Clarke (runner-up), Iain Minney (runner-up), Wiktoria Borkowska (honourable mention), Kathy Hoyle (honourable mention), and Kimaya Patil (honourable mention). You can read more about the competition here. 

Student and Staff News

Congratulations to PhD Creative Writing student Joe Bedford, who passed his viva in June! Joe has also had a short story published in issue 3 of Ragaire Magazine, available here.  

Congratulations to PhD Creative Writing student Laura Besley, whose new collection, sum of her PARTS, has just been published by V. Press. You can read more about it here. Laura's story "The Tilting World of Lotte Janssen" won Morgen Bailey's May 50-Word Short Story Competition, and her story "Playing at Dinner for Two" won the April Competition. You can read the stories here and here. Her story, "It's All So Unexpected," won second prize in the 500 Flash Fiction competition. You can read it here. Laura was also shortlisted for the prestigious Scratch Books Short Story Competition. You can read her story, "Every Winter Solstice," here. 

Congratulations to Constantine, MA Creative Writing graduate, whose new book, Alien Boy: Wasteland (sequel to Alien Boy) has been published by Coalville CAN Community Publishing. Read more here. 

Congratulations to MA Creative Writing graduate Sam Dawson whose story "Set in Stone" was published in the inaugural issue of The Bournemouth Journal. His story "Statues" has also been published by Crow & Cross Keys. You can read it here. He originally drafted both stories during his MA. 

Congratulations to Kit de Waal, Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Leicester, on the publication of her new novel, The Best of Everything. You can read more about the novel here. Kit was Chair of Judges for The Women's Prize for Fiction 2025. There is a video of the awards here, and more information on The Women's Prize website here. She was on BBC R4 Bookclub talking about My Name is Leon - available on BBC Sounds here. Kit has also become Ambassador of the charity Bookbanks. You can find more information on the charity's website here.

New Walk Editions, which is co-edited by Nick Everett, Associate Professor of American Literature and Creative Writing, published two new pamphlets in June: D. A. Prince’s Continuous Present and Richie McCaffery’s Skail. You can see more details on New Walk Editions' website here.

Congratulations to MA Creative Writing graduate Tracey Foster, who is guest poet on Mad Swirl here. Tracey has written a review for Everybody's Reviewing of Spring Cannot Be Cancelled, by Martin Gayford, here.

Congratulations to new PhD Creative Writing student Cathy Galvin, whose poetry collection Ethnology will be published by Bloodaxe Books in 2026. You can read more here. 

Congratulations to PhD Creative Writing student Beth Gaylard, who passed her PhD viva in June!

Congratulations to PhD Creative Writing student Kathy Hoyle, whose story "A Diner Full of Nothing'" is published by FlashFood here. 

Sabyn Javeri, PhD Creative Writing graduate, gave a public talk at Newcastle City Library with the NMC (North Modern and Contemporary Network), on the personal challenges of writing, on Thursday 3rd July.

Creative Writing student Grace Klemperer won both this year's G. S. Fraser Prize (for best undergraduate poetry submission) and the John Coleman Prize (for best undergraduate non-poetry submission). Honourable mentions for the G. S. Fraser Prize were given to Mahnoor Raja and Keeley Zappia. An honourable for the John Coleman Prize was given to Sarah Moritz. Congratulations to all!

The Strange History of Samuel Pepys's Diary by Kate Loveman, Professor of Early Modern Literature and Culture, was recently published by Cambridge University Press. You can read more about it here. 

Congratulations to Creative Writing student Dave Marston, whose poem "They" is published in a new anthology Salt in the Wound, published by Underland Review. You can read more here. 

Amirah Mohiddin, PhD Creative Writing graduate, has written a review of Birdy Arbuthnot's Year of "Yes" by Joanna Nadin for Everybody's Reviewing here. 

Sally Shaw, MA Creative Writing graduate, has written a review of The Two Keisukes by Brian Howell for Everybody's Reviewing here. 

PhD Creative Writing graduate, Hannah Stevens, has been interviewed about her writing for Pukaar Magazine. You can read the article here. 

Congratulations to Karen Stevens, Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Chichester University and also our External Examiner for the MA in Creative Writing (2020-2024), whose short story collection, Brilliant Blue, has been published by Barbican Press. You can read more about it here. 

Shauna Strathmann and Anna Walsh, MA Creative Writing students, recently performed at Leicester Quaker Meeting House as part of a series of "Green Talks." The event, which took place in June, was entitled "Changeable" and involved a poetry reading and discussion about Creative Writing and the climate crisis. 

Jonathan Taylor, Associate Professor of Creative Writing, won the Arnold Bennett Prize for his book of short stories, Scablands and Other Stories, in May. The prize is awarded bi-annually by the Arnold Bennett Society to the author of a book with connections to North Staffordshire. Jonathan's memoir, A Physical Education, was also longlisted for the award. You can read more about the award here and on the Society's website here. Jonathan's article, "Arnold Bennett, Stoke and Me," is on Chainlink Magazine here. In July, Jonathan was writer in residence for the day in Trentham Library, Stoke-on-Trent, as part of a project to mark 100 years of Stoke-on-Trent as a city. You can read more about the project here. Jonathan has also written reviews for The Times Literary Supplement here and The Morning Star here. His story "Bubble Man" was published in The Morning Star, and you can read it here. 

Paul Taylor-McCartney, PhD Creative Writing graduate, has written a review of Brilliant Blue by Karen Stevens, for Everybody's Reviewing here. He also reviewed raw content by Naomi Booth here. A short fiction title, "Twelve Stories for Twelve Sections," that Paul commissioned, co-edited, published and launched as a collaboration between Hermitage Press and Cornwall National Landscape was a first place winner at the prestigious Holyer an Gof Publishers’ Awards in July. Paul has also been busy promoting his children's novel, Sisters of the Pentacle, at various bookshops and retailers around Cornwall, having completed a draft of the second book in the series.

Nina Walker, PhD student, has written a review of sum of her PARTS by Laura Besley for Everybody's Reviewing here. 

Harry Whitehead, Associate Professor of Creative Writing, recently returned from a month's artist residency with the Ladakh Arts and Media Organisation (LAMO) in Ladakh, India. He was there to research and write his next novel, about a film crew coming unstuck while shooting a tyre advert in the Himalayas. While he was in Ladakh, he also gave a series of workshops and talks about Creative Writing. Harry's new novel, White Road, will be published in September by Claret Press. He will be launching the novel at the University of Leicester on Wednesday 1 October, 5.30pm-6.30pm, in the David Wilson Library. All are welcome, and details are here. Harry also wrote a review of Syllables of the Briny World by Georgina Key for Everybody's Reviewing here. 

Harry with the LAMO team in Ladakh, India

Congratulations to MA Creative Writing graduate Lisa Williams, whose story, "Dad's Shed," was published in the new issue of Blink Ink Magazine. 

As well as winning first prize in our book review competition (see above), PhD Creative Writing student Lee Wright has written a review of On Writers and Writing by Henry James for Everybody's Reviewing here. 

Alison Brackenbury, "Village"

 

Alison Brackenbury, born in Lincolnshire in 1953, is descended from long lines of servants and skilled farmworkers. She has published ten collections of poetry, most recently Thorpeness (Carcanet, 2022) and Gallop, her Selected Poems (Carcanet, 2019). Her work has won an Eric Gregory Award and a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors. The programmes she has written and narrated for BBC Radio 4 have been frequently been "Choices" in Radio Times, which praised her account of village life: "evocative, amusing and utterly compelling." After she left the village, Alison’s life ranged from a First-Class Oxford degree to industrial work. Memory, experience and the startling results of research have enriched Village, her brand-new, non-fiction prose book, honouring her Lincolnshire home. Alison’s writing about her village has recently been featured in The Guardian, The Telegraph, and The Financial Times, and discussed on The Verb on BBC Radio 4. Village has just been published in both digital and paperback forms. Alison's website is here. 

About Village, by Alison Brackenbury

Witches and wheelbarrows ...

Francis Weatherhogg, saddler and Census taker, had one special form to deliver. To a "witch" ... Under the shifting shadows of the walnut tree, Mary Ann opened the door of her tiny stone cottage. There she lived, unmarried, with a man whose extraordinary story spanned three continents. And Mary Ann herself – in 1891! – was still feared in her village for murderous "spells" ...

Village tells extraordinary stories of six homes, from 1841, when the first Census taker trudged up steep Hollowgate Hill, to 1971, when its author, aged 18, was driven below its thorn trees to Oxford. But she never forgot her village: Vicarage Road where Amy Mary, her grandmother, gleefully spoke of her rebellious survival of "service"; tall Rose Cottage, up "Long Lane," where Mrs Rudkin, pioneering archaeologist, brought the past to life for village children; the Mount, the farmhouse where the author’s family camped in a few grand rooms, and the mysterious cold Manor on its limestone ridge, "the Cliff" ...

The author’s memories began with cheerfulness. Her research revealed what women survived: especially abandoned, pregnant girls, struggling "Singlewomen," including Amy Mary’s own tiny, gallant sister. Yet it was in the finest houses that young wives in farming’s "Golden Age" crashed and burned.

 

And how did old Emma Jarman survive into her 80s, despite her Saturday night sessions in the Commercial Inn? She had her lift home booked with Mr Weatherhogg. In a wheelbarrow ...

You can read more about Village here. Below, you can read a short excerpt from the book. 

From Village

What the travelling woman saw

December, 1854. A hard winter in Lincolnshire. The lane-side trees, at the village edge, are caves of white above the dark figure, bundled in shawls. She has seen many things in her calls at cottages. But never before a woman on fire ...

Beneath the bare, grey-barked arms of a young walnut tree, the cottage is tiny. Hawking or begging to survive, it is in the smallest homes she may find villagers as kind as my grandmothers will be: superstitious Amy Mary, who buys lucky tokens, or tiny, benevolent Dot, the shepherd’s wife, who gives workless men a thick slice of bread and butter, and a brief, safe place by the fire.

No answer to her knock. But through the window’s thick glass, she glimpses a dangerous light. Glinting flames lick the long skirts of a woman, crumpled on the rug. Is the traveller afraid that the villagers will call her a thief? She rushes across the lane. She shrieks to Mary Herrick.

Does Mary stamp on the creeping hems of flame? Married to a "Cottager," who farms a few acres, she can afford stout boots, stitched by John Barratt, the village shoemaker. But her middle-aged neighbour has not survived. Her fall overturned a tub. She has suffocated in a pale flood of what the Coroner and The Lincolnshire Chronicle will mysteriously call "Paste."

Blue, huge, the sky sinks. Down the lane, a young girl dawdles, carrying a tired child, returning, reluctantly, from the excitement of a village wedding.

Christine Hammond, "Sojourn: Moments in Poetry"

 

Christine Hammond began writing poetry whilst studying English Literature at Queen’s University, Belfast. Her early poems were published in The Gown (QUB) and Women’s News where, as one of the original members she also wrote Arts Reviews and had work published in Spare Rib. She returned to writing after a long absence and her poetry has been featured in a variety of anthologies including The Poet’s Place and Movement (Poetry in Motion – The Community Arts Partnership), The Sea (Rebel Poetry Ireland), all four editions of Washing Windows and Her Other Language (Arlen House) and literary journal The Honest Ulsterman. She has also been a reader at Purely Poetry - Open Mic Night, Belfast.

Her collection Sojourn: Moments in Poetry has just been published in both digital and paperback forms.

About Sojourn: Moments in Poetry, by Christine Hammond 
Stylistically concise and visually vivid, this collection invites the reader into a reflective space – one filled with poetic resonance, yet open to individual interpretation. Whether inspired by real life, fictional construct or social observation, the poems in Sojourn flow with a deliberate rhythm that mirrors the title’s essence: a journey through moments that shape and define us. All are skilfully observed and articulated, frequently using the descriptive lens of nature and the natural order as a mechanism to contextualise, interpret and seek spiritual understanding. 

You can read more about Sojourn here. Below, you can read two sample poems from the collection. 

From Sojourn: Moments in Poetry

Flight Path

 

         Upwash to Strangford

Long and languid

the dark nights hang

heavy as a cloak 

festooned by Ursa Major

in the lane bats squeak, cats screech

a river runs tidal

and the moon’s soft filament flickers

dying to sunrise

slowly, the wild geese appear

a prelude of eager starts, then

more and more

join to shape the sacred apex

faith in formation

divine travellers lining the sky 

calling their sojourn across the dawn

gifting light from a slipstream 

Ritual

First, the ting-clang comforting din

of companion set with shovel

tuned to the scrape of grate and bucket then

fold, roll, wrap, tie, tuck it with sticks, with coal

till the glow of broadsheet rosettes

cast a news flash for the era

and headlines despatched themselves 

from the hearth

immaculate hearth of the fire altar

lit by my mother, high priestess of the house

who, standing back decreed

that coal’s more like slack, must speak to the coalman

Laura Besley, "sum of her PARTS"

Congratulations to Laura Besley, University of Leicester PhD student and MA Creative Writing graduate, whose new collection, sum of her PARTS, has just been published by V. Press!

Laura Besley (she/her) is the author of Sum of her PARTS, (Un)Natural Elements, 100neHundred – shortlisted for the Saboteur Awards – and The Almost Mothers. She is an editor with Flash Fiction Magazine and runs The NIFTY Book Club - a monthly online book club wherein participants read & discuss novellas-in-flash. Currently, she is a Creative Writing PhD student at the University of Leicester. Having lived in the Netherlands, Germany and Hong Kong, she now lives in land-locked central England and misses the sea. Her website is here.    

About sum of her PARTS, by Laura Besley
sum of her PARTS is a collection of 30 micro pieces, each exactly 50 words with a one-word title. They explore female body parts and how they are used and abused by those around them, as well as celebrated.  

You can read more about sum of her PARTS on the publisher's website here. You can read a review of the collection on Everybody's Reviewing here. Below, you can read two sample pieces from the collection. 

From sum of her PARTS

solitary

most days
I like
living alone, 
no one 
to moan
about my
lack of 
culinary skills
or clothes
strewn around; 
only when 
a robin - 
breast aglow - 
frolics in 
a birdbath
or I
almost choke
on a 
piece of 
molten cheese
on toast
do I 
regret certain 
decisions made
long ago.

bold

It's an hour before sunrise when I wake and discover I've turned into a trombone, my body shiny-sleek. I try out my new mouthpiece, a short shy toot at first. Subsequent blows grow in length and volume until I am blaring, brass-band loud. This is my voice. Hear me. Listen. 

A. S. Andrejevic, "Under the Same Moon"

 

A. S. Andrejevic is a Serbian-British writer whose work has appeared in The Lampeter Review, Storgy, The Wrong Quarterly, Scrutiny Journal, The Dawntreader, Scary Mommy, Literary Mama, Brain, Child, and other magazines. Her plays have been longlisted for the Bruntwood Prize, shortlisted by Bristol Old Vic, and supported by Arts Council England. She’s represented by Lorella Belli Literary Agency, and her debut novel, Under the Same Moon, is due out with APS Books in September 2025. She teaches Creative Writing at the University of Gloucestershire, where she encourages her students to think big, write with honesty, and stay true to their voice.

About Under the Same Moon, by A. S. Andrejevic
Under the Same Moon is a suspenseful story about Serbian emigrants in London during the 1990s wars, and how their past continues to haunt them, even decades later.

Jelena has built a very English life - now known as Helen, she relishes her elegant home in north London, her doting husband and two children, and the complete erasure of the country she once fled. But when a man she hasn’t seen in sixteen years shows up at her door, everything she’s built begins to unravel. 

As old loyalties resurface and buried memories threaten to destroy her carefully constructed world, Jelena must finally face the truth about what happened all those years ago. Did she betray the love of her life - or save herself from a dangerous man?

Told across two timelines and set in London and Belgrade, the novel weaves together the elegant neighbourhoods of West Hampstead, Soho’s underground clubs, and the shattered streets of 1990s Serbia and Kosovo. It’s a story of memory, identity, and the difficult choices we make to survive - and who we become as a result.

From Under the Same Moon

"You won't invite me to come in?" Mladen says in Serbian.  

"Come in?" she repeats pointlessly, as if there is anything else he could be talking about. To come in. Into her home. 

It feels odd to be speaking in her old language, probably the first time it's ever been spoken on this road. You can overhear it sometimes in Shepherd's Bush or the distant boroughs of East London, where Serbian stores smell of smoked ham and restaurants serve veal soup and pretend cheese-pie (because you just can't get cheese sour enough to pass for Serbian). But everyone speaks English here. 

She manages to focus back on the figure standing in front of her. "You mean, now?"  

He just keeps looking at her, his face still, undisturbed by the rain sliding into a trickle around his square chin. The garden is caught in a side wind and one of the flowerpots tumbles off its stand with a crash. 

"Unless I'm not welcome," he says.  

"Of course you are," she says and glances back over her shoulder. "The only thing is …" She's hoping for a sudden noise, something to make her family's presence obvious, off-putting.  

"U cemu je stvar, Jelena?" What's the thing? 

She scrambles for an answer. "My children are in bed," she says. "And my husband is working. I mean – working in his office. If I'd known you were coming –"   

"I don't have your number." 

"I could give it to you now?" She's never been a good liar, although she did manage that one time when it counted, in the car park at Sofia airport. "I'm free tomorrow. I could buy you lunch." 

"Now is better," Mladen says and makes a small step towards her. She doesn't mean to move but somehow she yields, and in the next instant he's inside.  

Afterwards, she'll agonise over this: would he have left them alone if she'd stood her ground?  

Susanna Crossman, "The Orange Notebooks"

 

Susanna Crossman is an essayist and award-winning fiction writer. The Orange Notebooks, her first English language novel, is out with Bluemoose Books (UK) and Assembly Press (North America) in 2025. Her acclaimed memoir, Home Is Where We Start: Growing up in the Fallout of the Utopian Dream, was published by Fig Tree, Penguin, in 2024. She has recent work in Aeon, The Guardian, Paris Review, Vogue and more. A published novelist in France, she regularly collaborates with artists. When she’s not writing, she works on three continents as a lecturer and clinical arts-therapist. A Hawthornden Fellow, in 2025 she is a writing resident at Hosking Houses Trust. Born in the UK, Susanna Crossman grew up in an international commune and now lives in France.

About The Orange Notebooks, by Susanna Crossman
Told through a mother’s journals written while interned in a French psychiatric ward, The Orange Notebooks is a novel about love, and the lost language and rituals of mourning. Following her son Lou’s death, Anna has a breakdown. Once hospitalized, Anna becomes determined to undo death by writing everything down in a set of orange notebooks: tales about her London childhood, her relationship with Lou’s Basque father, Antton, their meeting on a ferry on the day Princess Diana died, a cursed trench coat, the duplicity of beige, Lou’s Jewish and Basque heritage, death rituals, and the role of bees—because their wax makes the candles that light the path of the dead. In the psychiatric ward, Anna meets Yann, a Breton sea captain. Together, they go on a surreal Orphic journey to the underworld, sailing from Finistère to the middle of the English Channel, to try and find Lou at the exact point where his destiny began. Myth and reality collide, allowing Anna to journey through grief to radical hope.

You can read more about The Orange Notebooks on the author's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the novel. 

From The Orange Notebooks

My little buba, are you taking notes from this book as I write, are you using a keyboard or a pen? Buba, if you are reading these sentences, draw the boat. Add Yann, the boatman. Add your papa, he is calling your name. 

An ancient Japanese philosopher believed that somewhere there was a library, containing archives of all the words, in all languages: slang, literary, polished, idiomatic, and technical texts; manuscripts, scrolls, bestsellers, and brochures, pamphlets, and recordings, hardbacks, letters, and lists. Carefully preserved and classified, there are songs, slogans, and film scripts, jokes, and sermons. Diatribes and cartoons, myths and dreams. 

When I have finished transcribing my notebooks, I will walk through these library doors and seek out the Department for Miscellaneous: Lost Souls. In an aisle, marked Diverse Orange Documents of Differing Dimensions, I will place my notebooks on a shelf. 

I will tell the bees where I have left the orange notebooks; I will whisper it inside the hives. Politely, I’ll ask them to give you the message, to fly to you, buba, on the other side. Bees’ role in connecting flowers and pollination outweighs the importance of their honey chores. A third of crops rely on insect pollination. The bees must be kept alive to connect, pollinate, and deliver words. Survival is about communication and links between things, networks, alliances: pollen, bees, love, and flowers, beige and boys. 

My buba, are you walking along the library corridors? Have the bees dropped sweet nectar into your ears? On your tongue? Are your hands touching spines, seeking out titles and authors? Have you selected a book? Do your eyes look through each page? Are you reading me, reading these notebooks in the library? Louis, I am trying to show you a way home. 

James Nash, "Notes of Your Music"

James Nash is a writer and poet. A long-term resident of Leeds, his third collection of poems, Coma Songs, was published in 2003 and reprinted in 2006. He has two poems in Branch-Lines (Enitharmon Press, 2007), among fifty contemporary poets, including Seamus Heaney and U. A. Fanthorpe. Since 2012, his poetry has been published by Valley Press, beginning with selected poems, A Bit of An Ice Breaker, and his first collection of sonnets, Some Things Matter. Cinema Stories, celebrating the history of cinema in Leeds and written with fellow poet Matthew Hedley Stoppard, came out in 2015. A Bench for Billie Holiday was published in 2018, followed by his third collection of sonnets, Heart Stones, in November 2021. Notes of Your Music, a collection of sonnets bookended by two older-free verse poems, was published in June 2025. James's website is here.

About Notes of Your Music, by James Nash
In his fourth collection of sonnets – bookended by two free-form pieces – James Nash sets out to celebrate what may be gone, or flag up what might be celebrated before it goes. From the simple music of the bottle bank (a favourite task), to the biggest questions of the human experience, the poet's gentle, perceptive gaze illuminates all it surveys, delighting and moving in equal measure.

You can read more about Notes of Your Music on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read three sample poems from the collection. 

From Notes of Your Music

Petals – a preface

Remember the music we used to play?
The instruments still hang on the wall,
a trellis of brass roses
or an exotic vine with bugle flowers.
Like plumbing but not joined up,
and silent now.
And the lid of the piano is down

The tunes still prickle in my blood,
and though blooming less
each successive year,
have kept a scent of you.
And the truth is
that I have grown older and loved others,
but I shall always carry some notes of your music
in my pockets, like petals,
wherever I go.

1: This Resolution

This resolution to write more, to chase
Away the shadows, comes with fear.
I hope for a kindly, creative space
Where I can heal myself, where I can dare
To think and write again, to cast off
The fractures of the past, or celebrate
Their complex patterns, the tightly woven stuff
Of a lived life, that can chafe and fret.
For it comes with dangers, the possibility
Of a dark alley mugging, the bruised skin
And the traps of a past life that I can’t foresee
That might not free but chain my nightmares in.
But I will try to keep this promise that I give
And explore the life I’ve had, and now live.

 
2:  The promise

The parrot says, "Good morning," from its pen,
The menu is open in front of us
And I am in the world of choice again,
A solace, and all its promises.
If I were a doctor I would harness more
The power of self-prescribing, it brings
A sense of autonomy, of growth, the core
Is stimulated again and my tired heart sings.
It gives my self a chance to recalibrate,
To sift through what I feel and what I know,
Let melancholy in and then what fate
May choose to find for me, to show.
I rattle like buttons in a toffee tin,
I need to sort them. So let me in.

Karen Stevens, "Brilliant Blue"

 

Karen Stevens writes short fiction and has been published in a variety of anthologies and journals, including The Big Issue, Fish Publishing, Salt Publishing and Valley Press. She was runner-up for the prestigious ALCS Tom-Gallon Trust Award in 2023. Her edited collection of essays Writing a First Novel: Reflections on the Journey was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2014. Her co-edited collection of short stories High Spirits won a Saboteur Award for Best Anthology in 2019. Karen is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Chichester and lives in West Sussex. Brilliant Blue is her first collection of short stories.

About Brilliant Blue, by Karen Stevens
Welcome to the infamous Duncock Estate. Nestled on the South English coast, it is a place where identity matters; where people hold down jobs and do their best. Where taboos are broken, adultery is committed, and problems can’t be wished away. But even tragedy can be tinged with fragile hopes and humour.

You can read more about Brilliant Blue on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from one of the stories in the book. 

 

From Brilliant Blue

Extract from ‘Among the Crows’

It was knocking on four o’clock when Andy decided he’d had enough. There was no end to it: road after road of council houses with verges that he needed to strim. He’d taken his time again; just couldn’t be bothered. A full hour for lunch and several tea breaks, while Maciej – Mac, they’d nicknamed him at work – kept on going. The man was a machine. Intensely efficient.

The heat was doing Andy in; his throat felt scorched. He switched off the strimmer, removed his goggles and ear defenders. The sudden stillness alarmed him. He glanced behind, half expecting a drugged-up maniac to lunge and nick his strimmer. Mac was on the opposite side of the road, further on, heading for the finish line. For health and safety, the council’s rules were that workers must stay in pairs, but it was impossible for Andy to keep up with Mac, and impossible for Mac to slow down.

Andy watched Mac’s automated motion. His biceps were loaves. He swung his arms from left to right, chopping swathes of nettles and grass, getting the job done. No work, no cake, he’d say simply, whenever Andy griped about being sent into the dark heart of the Duncock Estate.

He sat on the verge and took in the council houses, their concrete walls bleached dirty-white from the sun. Objects poked out from the parched grass of a ramshackle garden opposite.

A rusting fridge revealed its mouldy interior. A child the same age as his Cora could fit in there, closing the door to hide, suffocating within minutes. He kept his eye on the fridge and felt relieved that he lived on the outskirts of this sprawling estate, where things were less desperate and hostile.