Yesterday No Precious Truth was released into the wild.
It’s there, waiting for you to adopt it and take it home.
If you really want to meet it (and the author – there’s always a downside) why not come to the book launch in Leeds?
It’s on Thursday, April 17, 6-7pm at Kirkstall Forge, a location that features in the book. Plenty of parking, or it has its own little railway station, five minutes on the train from Leeds City station. If you’re anywhere close to Leeds, I promise it’ll be worth your while.
I’d love to have as many people there as possible. It’s free, there’s cake, and Truman Books will be on hand to sell copies of the book. Artefacts from the Forge on display, photos from the war, replica war documents and newspapers for you to examine.
And cake. Did I say cake?
Please, come along. If you can email Lucinda at lucinda.yeadon@ceg.co.uk so she can keep an eye on the numbers, that would be great.
I hope to see plenty of faces. Thank you.
Chris Nickson 
I have just finished reading this book. To me it is your best book yet.
I read in bed. It kept me up late at night (just another page)
I could identify with a lot of the places and happenings. I was three and a half when the big raid of March 14/15 took place. We lived in Halton, near Gipton, where my father wad stationed as a fireman with the AFS. Dad was reserved occupation.
That night I was huddled in the Andersen in our back garden with my parents snd next door neighbours. My mother was praying “Please God save us” I was frightened of the noise and said “Oh God bombs” An incendiary landed in my grandmothers street about half a kilometre away from us in Wykeback Crescent, It didn’t go off and the detonator rolled down the ginnel between my grandmothers house and the one next door and into my grandma’s garden at the back. My grandparents were in the cellar with their two daughters, aged 10 and 16. They were terrified
The tram Cathy rattled down York road on would have been a number 20. The tram went past the Shaftesbury, past Wykebck Valley Road, and into Selby Road, and under the railway bridge, and our stop was next.
I have struggled for some time trying to remember the name of the Crossgates Factory where they filled the shells. You solved that problem for me. Barnbow.
I bought the book prepaid on the iPad, waiting for release, knowing that I could then get straight into reading it. But I intend to buy a hard copy for my collection of “most favourite books” It will sit alongside “Great expectations” Charles Dickens, “Lost Empires” JB Priestley, and City Lights” Keith Waterhouse.
Congratulations on this absolutely fantastic read.
Barbara
Hi Barbara, thank you so much for this, I’m so glad you liked it, and it’s wonderful to hear from someone who was there and experienced the Leeds Blitz. I could feel myself there with you and your family, and the story about the incendiary is great – the same with the detail on the tram. Thank you for all of that. honestly.
I’m honoured to be in such remarkable company on the most favourite. That Keith Waterhouse book is the best one I’ve ever read on Leeds, and I referred to it when I was writing the book.
The second Cathy book will be coming next April, set in March 1944.
Thank you again.
I am so pleased to read you are writing another Cathy book, and I look forward to it.. I will preorder like I did for No Precious Truth.
One of the urban rumours (myths??) that went around during the war was that the Germans were trying to hit Barnbow, but were confused by the pit hill, (which was not part of the original landscape) which stood in front of the houses in Dunhill Rise where I lived. I think it might have been more to do with the barrage balloons that hung over the area. We kids loved that pit hill and came home black from climbing it. My mother used to say “I will never get those knickers clean they look like they’ve been up fireback” 🙂 Happy days.
Yes the Keith Waterhouse book is a gem. I laughed my sides sore at some of it.
Cheers and thank you for such great books.
Barbara
I haven’t heard that rumour, but it makes sense. A friend did tell me that her father, who grew up in Gipton, said the place was called corned beef island. Proably an apocryphal story, but some driver left a lorry filled with tins of corned beef outside his house overnight, and it was gone in the morning, with people suddenly eating corned beef. I do love that, and the take of the escaped barrage balloon the paople tried to stop by tying the cables to a lamp post near Jimmy’s. It tore that from the ground, and was broguht under control later by an RAF crew. That one, from what I’ve read, is true.