Jules Acton - Oaklore, Adventures in a world of extraordinary trees

On the run up to Halloween join us to talk all things horror with Anna Bogutskaya.

In March 2020, Ben Masters’ father was diagnosed with terminal cancer. He was never happier than when outdoors, and spent his free time chasing butterflies. Despite his attempts to share this passion with his son, Ben was resistant. But as his father spent his final months confined to the house, unable for the first summer of his life to follow the butterfly cycle, Ben became his connection to the outside world. Blending memoir with nature writing, literary biography and pop-cultural history, this is an absorbing account of loss and grief and how moments of trauma can trigger poignant transformations.

The City of Durham, 1434. Out of a storm, an aging minstrel arrives at the cathedral to entertain the city’s most powerful men.

Mother Naked is his name, and the story he’s come to tell is the Legend of the Fell Wraith: the gruesome ‘walking ghost’ some say slaughtered the nearby village of Segerston forty years earlier.

But is this monster only a myth, born from the dim minds of toiling peasants? Or does the Wraith – and do the murders – have roots in real events suffered by those fated to a lifetime of labour? As Mother Naked weaves the strands of the mystery – of class, religion, art, and ale – it starts to seem as though the chilling truth might be closer to his privileged audience than they could ever imagine.

Taking its inspiration from a single payment entered into Durham’s Cathedral rolls, ‘Modyr Nakett’ was the lowest-paid performer in over 200 years of records. Set against the traumatic shadow of the Black Death and the Peasant’s Revolt, Mother Naked speaks back from the margins in a fury of imaginative recuperation.

A Night of Music and Poetry with Seni Senevirantne

The moving story of a life-changing relationship between a boy and a dog

When 18-year-old Benjamin Glass goes to look at a dead whale that has washed up on the beach, he meets an unfamiliar dog who follows him home to his caravan. Benjamin isn’t equipped to take care of a dog – he has a chronic fear of germs, and is currently living alone while his grandmother is in hospital.

But when a delivery driver recognises the dog as The Mighty Gary, the fastest greyhound in the country, and tells Benjamin about his unsavoury owners, Benjamin is forced to trust the stranger on his doorstep and devise a plan to keep Gary safe.

As Benjamin becomes more attached to the dog, it becomes clear that his trust in the delivery driver may well have been misplaced. He will have to leave his comfort zone, take some unhygienic risks, cross paths with dangerous and powerful men and confront his very worst fears if he has any hope of protecting what he loves the most.