Thought for food
REAL FAMILY FOOD by Antony Worrall Thompson (Mitchell Beazley, £16.99): SICK of the same old meals served up as safe bets for the kids? Fish-fingers, chicken nuggets and so on.
Non-fiction: Celts win the name game
Irish Baby Names (Foulsham, £4.99): LONG gone are the days of Sid and Bert and Gert and Daisy, and even the likes of Wayne and Dwayne and Jade and Kylie in the baby names stakes.
It's just criminal!
It was murder getting it off the ground, but now the Harrogate Crime Writing Festival is taking on a momentum of its own. Steve Pratt reports.
Master of the circumcision
WILFRED THESIGER: The Life of the Great Explorer by Alexander Maitland (HarperCollins, £25): IN an age where the limits of exploration have all but been exhausted, people still strive to contrive new records of endurance.
Books to cuddle up with
LISA SALMON looks at the efforts of the Children's Laureate to rekindle interest in bedtime story sessions.
When Aliens landed at Seaham
THE WORLDWIDE GUIDE TO MOVIE LOCATIONS by Tony Reeves (Titan, £16.99): WHERE in the world would film fans be without books like this? In this updated version, Tony Reeves takes a trip around the world visiting locations seen in 1,700 movies.
The terrible scourge of leprosy
THE ISLAND by Victoria Hislop (Headline Review, £6.99): NOT for a long time have I been so deeply moved by a novel.
Legacy of our pitman artist
McGUINNESS - INTERPRETING THE ART OF TOM McGUINNESS by Robert McManners and Gillian Wales (Gemini Productions, £14.95 softback/£24.95 hardback)
'Paula was jealous of me'
In a controversial memoir, Helene Thornton, the mother of Paula Yates, claims her daughter was distrubed from day one. Hannah Stephenson reports.
Treading on Northern toes
The Vengeance Man by John Dean (Hale £16.99): If anyone can blow away Frost on crime then it could be DCI John Blizzard.
NON FICTION
VOICES FROM THE HOME FRONT by Felicity Goodall (David and Charles, £19.99): THE Second World War was when the Home Front truly came into its own and there were as many heroes and heroines in dear old Blighty as there were on any Front line.
What a very rowdy Sunday crowd
CROSS TALK: An Osmotherley Scrapbook by George R. Jewitt (Osmotherley Society, £6.95, local shops): ONE of the two or three most popular villages in the North York Moors, Osmotherley struggles with the downside of tourism - chiefly traffic congestion and litter.
Tales from the trenches
THREE DAY ROAD by Joseph Boyden (Phoenix, £6.99) : A SPELLBINDING and unique tale of the Great War told from the point of view of American Indian sniper Xavier, intertwined with the story of his aunt Niska - the last of the Cree Indians to live off the snowy wilderness of North America.
How to insult people properly
WRINKLIES WIT & WISDOM: Humorous Quotes About Getting On a Bit, compiled by Rosemarie Jarski (Prion, £9.99)
The captain's fatal error
A well considered assessment of James Cook and his final voyage finds favour with Harry Mead - apart from, one glaring error.
Children's books
This Little Piggy and Other Rhymes to Sing and Play, edited by Jane Yolen, illustrated by Will Hillenbrand, musical arrangements by Adam Stemple (Walker £14.99)
DEAR AUSTEN by Nina Bawden (Virago, £6.99)
GOVERNMENTS - and the corporate world - must curse when someone like Nina Bawden gets caught up in their negligence, blunders and lethargy. A distinguished novelist, she was a passenger, with her husband, on the train from King's Cross which crashed at 100mph at Potters Bar, when it went over a set of points missing two vital bolts. Her husband, Austen, was among the seven who died, and she suffered multiple fractures and internal injuries.
Resurrecting the railways
LOST RAILWAYS OF NORTH & EAST YORKSHIRE by Gordon Suggitt (Countryside Books, £9.99).
Breaking the language barrier
LOST FOR WORDS by John Humphrys (Hodder, £7.99): HEADLINES recently highlighted a speech in which John Humphrys, right, Radio 4's Today presenter, said: "All you have to do is say John Prescott and people laugh".
The ale and hearty
NORTHERN FOLK: PEOPLE WHO SHAPED THE HISTORY OF OUR REGION by Bernard McCormick (Business Education Publishers Ltd, £8.95).
Armed with a camera
Alan Whicker became a household name as a TV personality and broadcaster, but few of his fans know of his early career as a war correspondent. Gavin Engelbrecht looks at his extraordinary experiences in the Second World War.
A Writer at War
A Writer at War: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army 1941-1945 by Vasily Grossman, edited by Antony Beevor, translated by Luba Vinogradova (Harvill, 20).
Science
A TEASPOON AND AN OPEN MIND: The Science of Doctor Who by Michael White (Penguin/Allen Lane, £12.99)
Mozart's 250th birthday
Mozart and His Operas by David Cairns (Allen Lane, £22): The Man Who Wrote Mozart: The extraordinary life of Lorenzo Da Ponte by Anthony Holden (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £18.99).
Best sellers
Hardbacks: 1. Jordan: A Whole New World by Katie Price
Non-Fiction
CHURCHILL'S BODYGUARDS by Tom Hickman (Headline, £20) NOBODY got closer to Winston Churchill than Walter Thompson, his bodyguard from 1921 until 1936 and for the Second World War years, and this biography, based on his memoirs, shows what a difficult and dangerous job he had. Thompson often spent more time with the great man than even his wife did and he had to be ready to travel anywhere, from the blitzed streets of London to the battlefields of Europe, putting his life on the line at any given moment.
Verses for body and soul
Harry Mead finds poetry alive and well in an inspiring collection for everyone living with illness - "their own and other people's".
Truffaut at work, by Carole Le Berre (Phaidon Press, £39.95)
THE renowned director of the French New Wave made films that reflected his three passions: a love of cinema, an interest in relationships between men and women and a fascination with children. It was his enthralment with cinema that saved him from a descent into a career of petty crime, setting him on the road to becoming a critic and, ultimately, a filmmaker.
Swallowing the moon
THE PLANETS by Dava Sobel (4th Estate, £15): TEN years ago Dava Sobel, an American writer, enjoyed a smash hit with Longitude, the story of attempts to produce an accurate seagoing clock, finally achieved by Yorkshireman John Harrison, to solve the problem of calculating longitude.
Was Lennon really the creative Beatle?
McCARTNEY, by Christopher Sandford (Century, £17.99): MUSIC journalist Christopher Sandford is a proven biographer having written well-received biographies of Kurt Cobain, Mick Jagger and now ex-Beatle Sir Paul McCartney.
Photos that spawned the films
STANLEY KUBRICK: DRAMA AND SHADOWS: PHOTOGRAPHS 1945-1950, by Rainer Crone (Phaidon, £39.95): THE name Stanley Kubrick is synonymous with cinematic perfection.
Fiction: A quest dogged by death
THE GRAVE TATTOO by Val McDermid (Harper Collins, £17.99): A MAGICAL multi-murder mystery that stretches from the mutiny on the Bounty in the South Pacific to the discovery of a tattooed body on a Lake District hillside in the new millennium and takes in a crime-ridden inner-London sink estate on the way.
'I love black print on white paper'
Having loved the printed word since childhood, it was no surprise when David Almond became a writer. The bestselling children's author talks to MILES SALTER
A pitman's portrait of life down under
Harry Mead digs into a short but invaluable record of the region's mining past.
A journalist's eye-view of Middle East mayhem
The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East by Robert Fisk (Fourth Estate, £25): THIS is a weighty tome.
The Geordie nation uncovered
What does it mean to be a Geordie? Barry Nelson looks at an updated collection of essays giving a unique picture of the region.
Return of a Victorian superhero
THE DIAMOND FRONTIER by John Wilcox (Headline £19.99): RELUCTANT Victorian superhero Simon Fonthill is back in the thick of the action again on the highly dangerous frontier of the Transvaal.
Non-fiction
100 WAYS TO IMPROVE YOUR HORSE'S BEHAVIOUR by Susan McBane (David and Charles, £19.99).
A cruel but quirky country
Two books delve into Yorkshire's past to give a fascinating picture of its life and language. HarryMead reports.
Great minds behind music
MOZART'S WOMEN: His Family, His Friends, His Music by Jane Glover (Macmillan, £20): IT is a timeworn adage that behind every successful man is a woman.
Best Sellers
HARDBACKS: 1. Sharon Osbourne Extreme: My Autobiography
Stocking fillers
A WAYNE IN A MANGER by Gervase Phinn (Penguin, £10): FORMER schools inspector Gervase Phinn has taken over from James Herriott and his series of Dales books have enchanted legions of fans with charming and heart-warming stories guaranteed to bring a smile to any face.
