'Believe in the Sign' is a 'sort of' memoir of a normal, average boy who would have grown up happily average and normal but for a dark and perverse passion: the seductive lure of masochistic devotion to a no-hope, near-derelict football club.

Mark Hodkinson grew up among the terrace houses of Rochdale in a house with just one book. Today, Mark is an author, journalist and publisher. He still lives in Rochdale but is now surrounded by 3,500 titles - at the last count. No One Round Here Reads Tolstoy is his story of growing up a working-class lad during the 1970s and 1980s. It's about the schools, the music, the people - but pre-eminently and profoundly the books and authors that led the way and shaped his life. It's about a family who didn't see the point of reading, and a troubled grandad who taught Mark the power of stories. It's also a story of how writing and reading has changed over the last five decades.

After a record 36 years stuck in the bottom division of the Football League, Rochdale AFC finally won promotion in 2009/10. This is a wry look at that season by a lifelong fan and acclaimed broadsheet journalist.

In 1973-74, Britain was in meltdown. The Arab-Israeli War had sent energy prices soaring. Petrol was scarce. Offices were limited to a temperature of 17C and power cuts were frequent. A three-day working week came in as inflation took hold and miners and other workers went on strike. The northern mill town of Rochdale suffered more than most. Its cotton industry was on shut-down in the face of cheap imports, and the football team was a mirror image of the town - tired, defeated, clinging to life. The Rochdale team of 1973-74 are considered the worst to play in the Football League. They finished bottom of the third division, winning just twice in 46 league matches. They closed the season with a 22-game winless run and played one home match in front of the lowest-ever post-war crowd. That season 32 players played for the team, many of them drafted in from amateur or Sunday league clubs. The Longest Winter is as much a piece of forensic social history as it is a sports book. It evokes the smells, textures and moods of the early 1970s.

'The Last Mad Surge of Youth' focuses on John Barrett whose band, Killings Stars, toured the world & enjoyed numerous hits while holding on to an integrity they forged through the revolution of punk & new wave. Inevitably, the hits dried up, his time ran out. He's now a washed up alcoholic.

The story of two men who almost single-handedly saved their football club from extinction. In the early 80s David Kilpatrick and Graham Morris spied architects' plans to turn Spotland, the home of their beloved, beleaguered Rochdale AFC, into a housing estate. They set about saving the club but first had to take on the alleged 'enemy within'. They worked tirelessly, persuading companies to write off debts while securing loans and donations, a tricky proposition when your club is bottom of the Football League. Meanwhile, the town of Rochdale was on its knees, the last of the cotton mills closing down. The limit of most fans' investment in their club is routinely the price of a season ticket. Directors often risk their houses and businesses, sometimes forfeiting marriages, families and their health in the name of their club. People such as Kilpatrick and Morris - moderately wealthy local businessmen - who serve on football club boards are the unseen, unsung heroes of football, even in the modern age.

Children's animated feature. When an apocalyptic flood threatens the Earth, Noah builds an ark to save all of the planet's animals two by two. But unfortunately for Dave (voice of Dermot Magennis) and his son Finny (Callum Maloney) Nestrians aren't allowed on board and after trying to sneak their way on in disguise, disaster strikes as the boat departs with Finny stranded back on land with young grymp Leah (Ava Connolly). The pair have to work together to survive the oncoming flood and try to find a way to return to the ark. Meanwhile, Dave, along with Leah's mum Hazel (Tara Flynn), have to put aside their differences to unite the ark in a quest to find their missing children.

The first biography of the legendary British band to focus on their formative years. it highlights the desperately urgent days of pre-stardom, when the Queen quartet played with bands like The Reaction, The Opposition, 1984 and Sour Milk Sea. Author Mark Hodkinson has interviewed over 60 friends and colleagues of Freddie Mercury, Brian May, Roger Taylor and John Deacon and pieced together a fascinating web of stories that for the first time tell the story of the emergent Queen. From the tiny downbeat village of Oadby in Leicestershire, where John Deacon grew up to the exotic splendour of Zanzibar, where Faroukh Bulsara was born, Hodkinson offers a new and enticing version of Queen. In tracing these unpublished stories he also examines the Queen era before and immediately after stardom. This is the first genuine account of Queen's rise to stardom, as told by those who knew the band and watched from the front row. Illustrated with many previously unseen early photographs of the four members of Queen.