Larkinland

Jonathan Tulloch has written a pitch perfect realization of Larkin's poetic world. Arriving in 1950s Hull, Arthur Merryweather finds himself lodging with the landlady from hell, and falling in love with fellow librarian Niamh O'Leary. But just as their love threatens to bloom, the mystery of Mr Bleaney, the enigmatic insurance salesman who rented his room before him, threatens to pull the poet into disaster and cast him into the criminal hinterland of ‘fish town’, that sublimely banal Larkinland 'beached on the mudflats at the end of the railway line, like a brick seal with a woodbine in its gob'.

Author of seven previous novels, including The Season Ticket, Give Us This Day and Mr McCool, Jonathan Tulloch's work has been filmed, staged, Radio 4 serialized and translated into five languages. He has won the Betty Trask Prize and The JB Priestley Award. He contributes to the Nature Notebook in the Times, and writes a weekly column in the second oldest weekly magazine in the English language. He is founder of The Sheltering Tree, a Middlesbrough writing group for writers recovering from addiction, and he also plays in the ceilidh band, Herd on the Hill.