CONTAINING a selection of Brenda Heslop’s songs, this is the 11th album issued by Ribbon Road over the last 26 years. Five of these songs were written especially for a project with Newcastle University looking into trauma associated with domestic violence. Brenda worked with a group of women who had survived domestic abuse and the songs were inspired by them and their stories.

KNOWN as an author of war poetry and classics such as ‘Flannan Isle’ and ‘The Golden Room’, Wilfrid Wilson Gibson also wrote with great understanding and emotion in the voice of early 20th century working men and women. This anthology has been published to commemorate 140 years since his birth in Hexham in 1878. He loved his native Northumberland with its ruined castles, wilderness and Roman history – subjects which feature in many of his poems.

A COMPANION volume to local author John Orton’s ‘The Five Stone Steps’ and ‘Blitz PAMs’, this book takes the reader back to the early 1900s when Arabs began arriving in the town. Two Yemeni seamen – Amin and Ali – encounter barefoot street urchins, fish and vegetable hawkers, then experience the great depression after the First World War, the pit lock-outs of 1921 and 1926 and the race riots of 1919 and 1930 when Arab and white sailors fought in the streets. Old photographs are used as illustrations.