The Overlooked – a novel by Ian Caro

Ian Caro was born in Castleford and lives on the Isle of Wight. He has worked as a stage manager, a lighting designer, a ghost writer and a lawyer, and currently provides pre-publication legal advice to a number of national and regional news publishers.

George Orwell imagined a world where Big Brother is always watching. But what if Big Brother doesn’t care and no one is watching?

Alex Winstone lives his life as if he’s constantly being watched. The Overlooked is the story of what happens when he discovers he’s not.

Set in a world much like our own, where morals are malleable and facts are whatever anyone can be persuaded to believe, this pithy novel is a study in anxiety and an examination of truth in the age of tabloid churnalism. The obsessive, insistent, fractured narrative is edgy and tense – Nineteen Eighty-Four reimagined by the lovechild of Chuck Palahniuk and Ernesto Sabato.

Out Of Darkness – selected poems by Barrie Singleton

Barrie Singleton was born angry. Conceived without consultation and born without consent, he has carried a disproportionate sense of injustice through almost eight decades. Age has mellowed him but his resolve has hardened – a latter-day Quixote sallying forth in verse to tilt at corruption, hypocrisy, false prophets and poor poets.

Out Of Darkness takes forty-two tilts at philosophical thought (Part 1, Deep Interstices), political animals (Part Two, Whither?) and pretentious poets (Part Three, Satirical Ballads). The style varies from poem to poem but the whole coheres around Barrie’s wry wit, acute observation and irreverent railing against thoughtless thought. He knows his onions, his science, his English ad his human conditions, and he abuses them all gloriously in this Quixotic selection.

The Shadowing Of Combfoot Chase- by Hillard Morley

Having studied Literature at Durham University, Hillard Morley Hillard Morley taught Drama and English for many years. In 2016 she made the decision to turn to writing full time, and since then her work has been published in literary journals worldwide. In 2020 she was shortlisted for the Independent Arts ‘Jot’ Award and in 2018 she won the OWT Short Fiction Prize. The Shadowing of Combfoot Chase is her first novel.

Rooted in concerns about surveillance capitalism and told in polyphonic, dark and witty episodes, the novel reveals a society under threat. Thought-provoking, frightening and funny in equal measure, The Shadowing of Combfoot Chase asks us to consider the consequences of privacies being eroded through hyper-surveillance, and challenges us not to take our freedoms for granted.

Five Things I Can See – by Fran Heath

Fran Heath is the author of bildungsroman novel, Pencil Lead. She’s also written and illustrated a rhyming picture book – How We Choose to Play – and a book of dreams – Unconscious Adventures. Her second novel, Five Things I Can See, is a snapshot into one woman’s struggles with the anxieties of modern life, motherhood and personal fulfilment. It will be published later this year.