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.

Kathryn Aldridge-Morris, "Cold Toast"

Kathryn Aldridge-Morris is a Bristol-based writer whose debut collection of flash fiction Cold Toast has recently been published by Dahlia Books. Her work has been published in various anthologies and literary magazines, including the Aesthetica Creative Writing Annual, Pithead Chapel, The Four Faced Liar, Stanchion Magazine, and elsewhere. She has won the Bath Flash Fiction Award, The Forge's Flash Nonfiction competition, Lucent Dreaming’s flash contest, and Manchester Writing School’s QuietManDave Prize, and her work was selected for the Wigleaf Top 50 in 2023 and 2025. She is currently working on a novella-in-flash, supported by an Arts Council England DYCP Award. Her author website is here. 

About Cold Toast, by Kathryn Aldridge-Morris
Rooted in 70s and 80s Britain, this evocative flash fiction collection captures the moments when girls and women first glimpsed their own power – or lack of it.

Set against a backdrop of smoky kitchens, playground politics, and flickering TV sets, these stories trace the quiet rebellions and uneasy compromises of lives shaped by expectation and constraint. Two women discuss an unfaithful husband at the school gates. A father trades his daughter’s first kiss for a fishing trip. A girl becomes convinced the silent calls to her home are from the Yorkshire Ripper.

By turns tender, raw, and defiant, this collection lays bare the tension between freedom and conformity, love and survival, and what it meant to come of age in a world that wasn’t always ready for you.

You can read more about Cold Toast on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read a sample flash fiction from the collection. 

From Cold Toast
Note: this flash fiction, ‘Double Lives,’ appears in Cold Toast and was the winner of Manchester Writing School and Manchester School of Theatre’s ‘QuietManDave Prize’ in 2022, and also appears in Fuel: An anthology of prize-winning flash fictions to raise funds for fuel poverty, edited by Tania Hershman. It is written in the form of a breathless sentence.

Double Lives

I see Gwen at the school gates and she does this thing where she’s looking but not seeing and I’m not in the mood so I wave my hands in her face and she says sorry, but she’s still got this unseeing expression and I ask is everything ok? and she says yeah, if finding out your husband’s living with another woman in the arse end of Wales is ok, and I say what, you mean your husband Rhys? and she nods, and says yes, my husband Rhys, and it’s a crazy way for us to be carrying on because she only has one husband, but I’m not getting it, so I say Rhys Rhys? and she says, Rhys Rhys, and I feel a kind of vertigo because it was only last March when I noticed how he’d started hanging back after dropping the kids off, how easy it was to talk to him about all the stuff no one else ever wants to talk about, like how we all create our own prisons and how we’ll bring our kids up to know there are more choices out there, how I was the only mother he spoke to, the only mother whose jokes he laughed at, and how good it felt to crack a crooked smile in the face Gwen always described as being like a slapped backside―and I think they’ve been together since they were fifteen, to be honest, I had thought a lot about that, about getting to your forties and only sleeping with one other person and if Rhys had ever thought about sleeping with other women before―before that first crazy time―and Gwen says she’s going to get a test from the pharmacy because how many other women has he been sleeping with, and I’m like, you think there could have been more? and she shrugs, and I’m getting this weird double vision thing where the canopies on the horse chestnuts in front of us aren’t lined up with the trunks and my left arm starts going numb, and I say, I’m not feeling too good and she says, Rhys told me you got migraines, and says, bye then, so I say, bye then, and watch her go; double-Gwen surrounded by an aura of fucked electrical impulses only I can see.

Ruth Bidgood, "Chosen Poems," with a memoir by Merryn Williams

By Merryn Williams 

I first met Ruth Bidgood (1922-2022) when I was a struggling new poet and she was one of the most eminent Welsh poets in English. We shared a love of the "green desert" of mid-Wales – ruined cottages, ever-changing weather, high hills you could ascend into a "cold kingdom of black bog and rock." She had retreated to the tiny village of Abergwesyn, where she lived quietly, after several silent years in the Home Counties and a painful divorce.  

Her language was always plain and clear, what Wordsworth called "the real language of men." Here is a short poem which expresses piercing sorrow through the simplest images:

Elegy for Sarah

Bitter apples load the tree

by a girl’s grave

in a tangle of summer weeds.

Small wet apples glow

through summer rain.

"My days are past"

she cries from her stone,

"my purposes are broken off" –

apple bough broken,

fallen in dripping weeds.

"even the thoughts of my heart."

My thoughts, my purposes, my days

broken among weeds,

and summer rain falling

on wet stone, bitter apples.

That’s exactly how it feels, standing near a crumbling Welsh church in the rain thinking of the lives that have ended. She was interested in exploring, not so much the hilly country itself, as landscapes of the mind:

Acquaintance

It was from a border county of my life

you crossed into another country, 

having never settled. Smoke rose one dawn

from the overnight house for which

your thrown stone transitorily defined

a patch of my waste land; but soon

the hut was derelict. Acquaintance ending

seems not to warrant uneasier weather

than a fraction of wind-change brings;

yet over my moors the sky sags now,

black with irrational certainty

of departures. From your hasty thatch

rushes loosen, blow east. The heartland may be next

to know depopulation.

A relationship which never became a close friendship is described through images of the sparsely populated land around Abergwesyn. And next thing you know, her family is about to break up.

 Ruth immersed herself in local history and wrote wonderful poems about obscure and vanished people - servants, small farmers, a man who emigrates to Australia and a man who doesn’t ("Emu’s Egg"). She wrote too about the great subjects of darkness and light ("Driving through 95% Eclipse"), about the threats to, and from nature ("Slate Quarry, Penceulan"), and restrainedly about her deep love for a man who died ("Voyage"). She never talked much about herself, so after her death and with the permission of her children, I explored her previous life as a girl in Port Talbot (where Richard Burton was a schoolmate), a Wren in wartime and a 1950s housewife. The poetry came late, coinciding with her move back to Wales, and although she went on writing well into her nineties the great poems belong to the Abergwesyn years. It turned out that this little patch of earth yielded an inexhaustible subject, and I find myself re-reading her poems constantly and with growing admiration.

You can read more about Chosen Poems by Ruth Bidgood, with a memoir by Merryn Williams, here. 

Book Review Competition 2025: The Results

Recently, our popular review blog, Everybody’s Reviewing, passed half a million readers. To celebrate this milestone, Everybody’s Reviewing and the Centre for New Writing ran a 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. You can read more about it here. 

The standard of entries was very high indeed - every entry we received was professional, well-written and eminently publishable. Results of the competition are below. First prize is £100 in gift vouchers. There are also two second prizes of £25 each in vouchers, plus three "Honourable Mentions." All winning entries will be published on Everybody's Reviewing over the next week or so. Congratulations to everyone involved!

Results

1st Prize: Lee Wright, for his review of On Agoraphobia, by Graham Caveney

Runner-Up: Mellissa Flowerdew-Clarke, for her review of The Book of Guilt, by Catherine Chidgey

Runner-Up: Iain Minney, for his review of The Day of the Triffids, by John Wyndham

Honourable Mention: Wiktoria Borkowska, for her review of I Who Have Never Known Men, by Jacqueline Harpman

Honourable Mention: Kathy Hoyle, for her review of Cuddy, by Benjamin Myers

Honourable Mention: Kimaya Patil, for her review of Fourth Wing, by Rebecca Yarros

D. A. Prince, "Continuous Present"

  

Since 2008, D. A. Prince has published three collections with HappenStance Press. The second, Common Ground, won the East Midlands Book Award in 2015. The third, The Bigger Picture (2022), includes ‘The Window,’ Highly Commended in the Forward Prizes anthology for 2020. Her poems have also made less conventional appearances: as bookmarks, on posters on the Longbenton Metro station in Newcastle, and even handwritten, on biscuit wrappers as part of the Wrapper Rhymes installation at StAnza in 2020. Prince reviews contemporary poetry for London Grip, The Friday Poem and Orbis among other literary magazines. 

Prince's new pamphlet, Continuous Present, is published by New Walk Editions, which is co-edited by Nick Everett, Associate Professor of American Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Leicester. 

About Continuous Present, by D. A. Prince
Is there such a thing as an ‘average moment’? If so, what might it contain? The varied immediacy of the natural world, perhaps, richly green; a conversation on a suburban bus or at the hairdresser; or the monotony of the M1 in heavy traffic, where the relentless pressure from heavy lorries and their mission statements – Driven by Perfection, Optimal Solutions, Your Tomorrow Delivered Today – tower over you and your small car. While the continuity of time brings the past close to the present, just out of sight there are other worlds: the what-ifs, parallel lives and choices you might have made. These poems explore the textures of routine experience but also glimpse alternative dimensions within and beyond our daily lives.

You can read more about Continuous Present on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read two sample poems from the collection.

From Continuous Present

I’d Got My Notebook Out

but the man by the window untangling his hearing aids
explains how the batteries stick — no, not rechargeable —
and, when the bus bounces, that the drain covers
need resetting, how it’s easier with tarmac
unlike the Chinese granite — this City Council,
that Mayor they’ve got — and he and his brother
(both into archaeology) complained —
but do they listen? Then he’s back to the cellar,
his aunt’s house, demolished now —
but you know that bar, that Belgian one —
and when the gas was put in
they found a hole, could see three arches
with those Roman bricks, and a wall,
but were the Council interested? And now
it’s all gone, but what’s beneath, buried:
who knows? Gets off at the museum
(two developers gone bust, the deadlined posters
eaten by the rain) and pavement, asphalt, tarmac
aren’t the solid footings they were yesterday.

Cézanne at Tate Modern

Too many apples says my friend, dismissing
Cézanne and his stubborn brush working
the canvas over and over, trying
to uncover truth or whatever
lies under the skin. His apple-flesh grows solid
but never solid enough for him:
he’s weighing their presence, finding that they lack
what his brush won’t give. Perhaps it’s the light
falling too thin on them, too forgiving
of failure. Perhaps he can’t forgive himself,
his hand closing too tight. Perhaps
one more time will get it right, then one more time.
He can’t have too many apples. None
is perfect but it’s no longer apples that matter,
only how in the alchemy of oil and canvas
and his brush they become apples.
Obstinate, indestructible, wrote Rilke
after Cézanne’s death. Now they hang here
framed and untouchable, still challenging
the ticketed crowd nodding past,
familiar with the surface blur of apples
— Too many apples — red, green, why so many? —
not seeing each apple testing itself
against the previously unpaintable air,
the brush coming to terms with the press of paint
against weave and hand and eye.
We can’t have too many apples.