Books published by Valley Press

¿When you turn on the bathroom light your reflection stares numbly back at you, gormless and vacant. You blink. Your eyes are yellow, as is your skin. Yoüve lost weight: your pyjamas hang off your arms like the wilting leaves of a dying plant.You stare at yourself in the mirror for several surreal minutes. The thing before you is not you. But it is.¿In January 2011, aged 21, Tom Preston was diagnosed with stage 4 advanced aggressive lymphoma. His chances of survival were optimistically placed at around 40%. This short, autobiographical work tells the story of the fight in the months that followed ¿ but this is no ordinary cancer memoir.The Boy in the Mirror is written in the second person ¿ so the events in this book are happening to you, the reader, living through the hope, love, suffering, death and black comedy encountered by Tom during the battle to save himself."A raw account of his months of excrutiating pioneering treatment." - The Sunday Times"This is ultimately a book about love, trust, and overcoming death-defying odds." - The Sun

Bird, beast or man, we each have the same element at our core: bones. While our forms may change, the bones always remain ¿ and in this thrilling debut, the poet celebrates their beauty and structure though folk tales, philosophy, day dreams and night terrors. Aided by a host of characters including a girl who fell in love with a mountain, a woman who can only ever look at you sideways, and a man made of bees, Caroline Hardaker creates a dozen unforgettable worlds entirely her own.

Sparks is the third collection of passionate, poignant poetry from much-loved Hull-based author Norah Hanson. The fiery wit and hard-won wisdom that characterised her previous collections are here, intact, with a new level of clarity and purpose adding weight to the words - without losing the warmth, wonder, and laugh-out-loud observational skills that have won Norah readers across the world. Now six-times a great-grandmother, the poet's life experience shines through each page. There are no riddles or literary exercises here; Norah's refreshingly (and deceptively) direct language seems to rise from the earth itself.

Here is a book that celebrates the joys, the aches, the lapses, the frustrations and the creaks of the retirement years. With fifty funny, nostalgic and poignant rhymes about childhood memories, hair loss, modern technology, manners, packaging, cats, grandchildren and more it¿s the perfect read for those of fifty-plus who like a chuckle.

Mr Jolly is the first collection of short stories by Michael Stewart, and contains some of the award-winning novelist¿s most extraordinary writing to date. Each tale offers a unique, utterly compelling insight into the human condition, framed by a mind-bendingly original concept that no other writer working today could ¿ or indeed would ¿ have concocted. Readers will meet a conformity-obsessed league of bald men, breaking into homes for an extended debate about the nature of freedom; discuss the nomenclature of the marshmallow with a man whose single goal in life is to witness them accidentally skewered on stiletto heels; and meet God, in perhaps the most frustrating (yet believable) depiction of the divine being in modern literature.Last phone calls, alien abductions, murders and more are grounded in stories of struggling parents, baffled lovers and lost children (some of who may live permanently onthe number 606 bus). However long you live, and however much you read, yoüll never come across another book quite like this.

In David O¿Hanlon¿s first full-length collection, precise, piercing language illuminates tales from actual, mythical and personal history ¿ making all three seem immediate, contemporary and universal. Readers will hear how ¿four unacquainted deaf men published near-identical essays deconstructing the assumed importance of sound¿, find new ways of reading the stories of Orpheus, Sisypus, Tantalus et al., and learn of a young man¿s twelve-year struggle to paint an authentic picture of the sky.