This book follows the lives of 2 families over 5 generations, centred in and around Bradford and starts in 1843. It is fascinating reading about the conditions of those times, how hard life was and how much the wool industry affected people, with a huge divide between those who owned the mills and the workers.  A great deal of history has been incorporated into the book, and the very fact that it is a story makes more of an impression than just reading a history book. I loved reading about local places like Saltaire and Shipley Glen, as they are on the doorstep and I've been to them.   As with all families, some offspring leave their home town and start lives elsewhere. There is huge diversity where some of them end up and what they do for a living.

Marion Payne

On Friday 18 March, I will be giving an illustrated talk about my historical novel, 'Something in the Aire', to members of the 1152 Club in the Chapter House of Kirkstall Abbey, Leeds, starting at 10am. As at the Ilkley Literature Festival Fringe last October, I will be joined in the presentation by my former BBC Radio Leeds colleague Trevor Thewlis

Ilkley Literature Festival Fringe

I am appearing in an Ilkley Literature Festival Fringe event on Friday 16 October at 9.p.m. It's being held in the Ilkley Playhouse, Wildman Theatre.   I shall be talking about my book Something in the Aire, with Trevor Thewlis reading selected excerpts.   Accompanying us in song will be Saltaire poet and balladeer Eddie Lawler.

Book of the Week

You can imagine how delighted we were:
'Something in the Aire'
Book of the Week, Jan '15
(c) Telegraph and Argos

Welcome to Wrymouth Publications

The city of my youth - a landscape of storied mills and belching chimneys, of horse-drawn carts laden with bursting wool sacks, of rackety tramcars swaying between smoke-blackened Victorian elevations- is a fast fading memory today. After a century of domination, the woollen industry that brought Bradford considerable wealth and civic pride suffered rapid decline, leaving only the industrial archaeology of that ‘golden age’ for local historians to pore over.

Through the fictional lives of five generations of one family, I set out to chronicle the evolution of this textile city from its squalid origins during unprecedented growth, to the dawn of workers’ rights and civic enterprise. In 1843, Jack and Fanny Ackroyd found a dynasty that must survive morbid illness, social injustice, and the horror of war to reach the relatively sunlit uplands of modern life. Central to this tapestry of life and loves, local aristocracy are forced to provide the ultimate solution to Bradford’s pollution woes, while providing an intriguing enigma that plays out across national and international boundaries.

This book is not meant to be a biography, although I have used memories of growing up in the Aire valley to add colour to my research. It was only on its completion I realised it was my paean to the city that gave me life.