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Shakespeare’s Cryptic Sonnets
John M. Glauser

Published: 9th June 2025
Hardback: 343 pages
Price: £25.00
ISBN: 978-1-914424-45-8
Available from
The Great British Bookshop
and
Amazon
Shakespeare’s Cryptic Sonnets
An interpretation
by John M. Glauser

In this fascinating and meticulous exploration of the language used in Shakespeare’s more mysterious Sonnets, John M. Glauser illuminates hitherto misunderstood areas of the poet’s work and suggests solutions to some of the most enduring linguistic puzzles.

To this end, the author extends his research beyond the Sonnets to Shakespeare’s other works – his longer poetical works and plays – and to his relationships with the most important people in his life, particularly his young patron, the 3rd Earl of Southampton, but not excluding the mysterious Dark Lady and other key figures.

The result is an intriguing and convincing new portrayal of Shakespeare’s complex, multi-layered writing and the often hidden religious and political meanings it contains – evidence of the poet’s dangerously unpopular opinions in the brutal world of the late sixteenth century.


Shakespeare’s Cryptic Sonnets is the product of over thirty-five years’ dedicated research.
Childrens

Meg’s Final Journey
T. A. Marshall
Published: May 2025
Paperback: 96 pages
Price: £8.00
ISBN: 978-1-915972-77-4
Available from
The Great British Bookshop
and
Amazon
Meg's Final Journey
by T. A. Marshall

Meg Larkin is in shock.

She has been given a terminal diagnosis by her doctor and she is expected to accept the inevitable without challenge - but she’s never been one to give up without a fight.

She plain refuses to accept the diagnosis and to let it define her fate and returns home disconsolate and angry. But good things can happen at any time.

There, on the doormat, is an invitation to join a luxury cruise, an escape from life’s problems.
It’s almost too good to be true.

Packing a small bag and with a careful choice of clothes, she goes on one ultimate journey.

And once on board, battling through the harsh realities of her illness, she finds unexpected strength and an ardent passion for the life that she is determined to hold on to.

What will become of her? Sometimes the hardest battles can lead to the most peaceful victories.

 
Tracey was born in Sheffield, South Yorkshire.
She is married and has two children who are both just entering their forties and lives in the lovely village of Thorpe Hesley.
A qualified tutor, she has a degree in teaching and has worked in the education sector for over 20 years.
Her work background is in the health and social care sector.
At seven years old, while at primary school, she won a book as prize for the best written account of a school trip and her vivid imagination stays with her.
fiction

White Wolf
Nick Gosman

Published: May 2025
Paperback: 281 pages
Price: £12.99
ISBN: 978-1-915972-76-7
Available from
The Great British Bookshop
and
Amazon
White Wolf
by Nick Gosman

In a story that pays homage to the latter-day frontier world of Jack London, WHITE WOLF recounts a lone woman’s struggle to survive in the arctic wastes of a forgotten land far from the world that most of us know or could imagine.

Here, in a purest space of bitter cold and uncompromising hardship, Migla is reborn. Forced to discover herself anew, her experience fosters a second catharsis and she becomes a different person.

Delving into her being to find the strength to survive, Migla comes to terms with her new life and falls in love with the animals and plants she encounters there. At times mystical and enchanting and at others deeply disturbing, WHITE WOLF is a treatise on the transcendence of the human spirit and the redeeming power of nature.

“All that is left of me is my robe and my spirit. Now I’m dying, I gave everything away. I don’t have anything to give you anymore. Only my robe and my spirit are in your hands. Now my tears come”

Wallace Black Elk



Nick Gosman gained an insight into what it takes to survive in the wilderness during his formative years climbing and mountaineering in Scotland and Continental Europe.

Since his early years wondering the world’s empty spaces with family and friends, wild nature has come to hold a deep spiritual resonance with the author, which he attempts to bring to his story-telling.
fiction

The Man on the Mountain
A babyboomer love story

Michael McCarthy won the 2023 Creative Writing Award of the Association for The Study of Literature and the Environment, the body which represents teachers and scholars of environmental writing and eco-criticism.


 The Man on the Mountain
A babyboomer love story
by Michael McCarthy

What was the essence of the babyboomers? Were they just the luckiest and most privileged generation ever to walk the earth? For they certainly were that, enjoying everything from unheard-of security and unprecedented freedoms to an old age which for many ended in riches, leaving them the object of angry resentment from the generations who followed and had a harder path through life.

Yet when they started out, the babyboomers also had purpose: they wanted to make the world a better place – at least, the best of them did. Gideon Horrocks and Graham Blenkinsop were two such, radical students together at the end of the sixties: Horrocks the Marxist revolutionary and Blenkinsop the underground chemist manufacturing that most archetypal of babyboomer hallucinogens, LSD.

But when, a decade after university, the two men reunite to make LSD on a scale big enough to flood all of Europe, in an isolated old house on the Lancashire moors, Horrocks has lost his radical beliefs, and uses his share of the money that rolls in to start a fashionable restaurant, which becomes the most glamorous and successful restaurant in the North of England.

On New Year’s Eve 1980, Horrocks is giving a party in a wine bar to celebrate his success when he drunkenly intervenes in a police arrest and is himself arrested for obstruction. He resolves to take revenge on the young officer who detains him, WPC Claire Sowerby, a probationary member of the local drug squad – yet instead, he falls in love with her. Unknown to him, however, the squad of which Claire Sowerby is a member is on his trail, and it is under these circumstances that they come together, two people who have both been damaged and shaped by great unhappiness in their pasts, and who, wholly unexpectedly, find in each other the possibility of a happy future. But circumstances are closing in...

Set in the early years of Thatcher’s Britain, in the industrial Lancashire of the nineteen-eighties with unemployment rapidly rising, The Man On The Mountain tells two gripping and interlocking stories – one about the fate of the most extraordinary of generations, and the other about the power of love to reopen even the most tightly closed of human hearts.

Published: May 2025
Paperback: 323 pages
Price: £12.99
ISBN: 9781915972729
Available from Amazon

Michael McCarthy is one of Britain’s leading writers on the environment and the natural world, and has won a string of awards for his work as Environment Correspondent of The Times and Environment Editor of The Independent. As an author he has written Say Goodbye To The Cuckoo (2009) and The Moth Snowstorm – Nature and Joy (2015) both of which were widely praised, with the latter book shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize and the Richard Jefferies Prize.
Most recently he has written (with Jeremy Mynott and Peter Marren) The Consolation of Nature – Spring in the Time of Coronavirus (2020) which was chosen as one of The Guardian’s Nature Books of The Year. This is his first novel..

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