Making it up

Fiction is mentioned many times in the book, and most of the significant works I've read are listed in the text. Here are some others. I've always like W.Riley's Laycock of Lonedale, Herbert Jenkins 1924, since my mother read me the opening sentence of its foreword: 'Laycock, Wainwright and Binns - these are common names in the industrial parts of the West Riding...' Riley was recently treated to that occasional honour of being rediscovered by an academic who called him 'a forgotten author.' Not by me, and not by many others who particularly remember his best-known book Windyridge, 1912.
Speeding up to current times, Climbers by M.John Harrison gives a great and not entirely traditionally dour and gritty view of the North, especially the climbers' cliffs scattered in odd places such as above laybys in the Pennines and Peak. Phoenix 1989. Lucy Newlyn's book of poetry, Ginnel, Carcanet 2005, has a distinctive and accurate feel for that great Leeds suburb, Headingley. She is a Northerner who has done well - now professor of English language and literature at Oxford University.