There's incredible literary talent in the North and we love to celebrate it - join us in toasting three Northern queer novels!

There is some incredible literary talent emerging from the North and we love an occasion to celebrate it - join us in toasting not one, but THREE queer novels from Northern writers! Experience a hot Edinburgh summer, an eerie haunted ship in the Atlantic and a few years at university...this event has it all!

The books:

Summer Hours by Alessandra Thom

It's a hot Edinburgh summer, and Roisin’s life is stagnating. She spends her days cancelling plans, skipping work and drinking lukewarm wine in the bathtub with her best friend Eve. When their wealthy mutual friend Claire offers Roisin a significant amount of money under the guise of ‘freelance work,’ Roisin thinks her luck might finally be changing. But Claire’s proposal is not all it seems, and soon Roisin finds herself trapped. Paralysed by both her intense infatuation with Eve and her secret arrangement with Claire, Roisin must walk a delicate line to avoid losing what matters to her most.

The Haunting of Avis Lovelock by MK Hardy

When Avis Lovelock agreed to sail on Excambion, she didn't realise she agreed to a journey filled with ghosts... and a spiritualist who sees in Avis what no one else can. Strangely, nobody ever thanks Avis when she exposes mediums for the fakes they are. As she begins her investigations, she runs afoul of the famous twin spiritualists onboard, Gideon and Rachel Duquesne. To discover the truth, Avis must join forces with her opponents, and confront some haunting secrets of her own.

Cacoethes by Chloe de Lullington

18-year-old Erin is bisexual - she just doesn't know it yet. A fresher at university and determined to embody the Cool Girl archetype, it's not long before a chance Tinder match reels this very modern ingenue into a world of BDSM and power-play that consumes and intrigues her as much as it stresses out her friends.

The authors:

Alessandra Thom is a writer from Aberdeenshire based in Edinburgh. Her first novel, Summer Hours, is out now. She was shortlisted for The List Rising Scottish Author Award 2025, was a Scottish Book Trust New Writers Awardee for Prose in 2023 and won second place in the Short Fiction International Short Story Prize 2024. She has written for BBC Studios and her short stories have appeared in Gutter and Short Fiction. She is represented by Seren Adams @ Lexington Literary.

MK Hardy is the pen name for two geeky women living and writing together in Scotland. Their debut Sapphic Historical Gothic novel, The Needfire, released in the UK in July 2025 from Solaris. They also have two books out in Summer 2026 – Splasher (Penguin, under the name Billie Host), and The Haunting of Avis Lovelock (Solaris). They were mentees in the Pitch Wars 2020-21 programme, and mentors for Queery Fest 2022. They are organisers and facilitators for Scotland’s Cymera Festival. They are represented by John Baker at Bell Lomax Moreton.

Chloe de Lullington is an author and screenwriter based just outside Manchester, having grown up on the outskirts of pretty much everything else as well - which, as it turns out, makes for the most compelling stories! Drawn to the eccentric and the liminal, she's good at funny with a side of sad. Cacoethes is her first novel.

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