In her third full-length collection 'Blood Child', Eleanor Rees hones and extends her startling use of language and imagery to enact the many aspects of change - fleeting, elusive or moored in a negotiation of the material world as she roams through the landscapes of self and city. The idea of generation is explored in all its possibilities, the 'child' and the 'girl' are recurrent motifs, immanent and on the threshold of a magical or imaginative transformation. Landscapes are crossed, swum, burrowed under or flown above; skins and edges are sheared or lost, new coverings found and remade. Rees's poems ask how new routes can be forged across shifting terrain and she offers the emergent space of the imagination as the only answer.

Bringing together fiction from some of the city's most celebrated writers, The Book of Liverpool traces the unique contours that decades of social and economic change can impress on a city. Set against key historical moments from the Second World War to the Capital of Culture year, these stories question what 'belonging' and 'home' mean in the Liverpudlian context, from the regenerated city centre to satellite suburbs, from the sparring cathedrals to the no-go concrete housing estates. Liverpool emerges in these short stories as a city in constant flux: haunted by ghosts, buoyed up by myths, and shifting with an ebb and flow like the Mersey itself.