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360 AD: A woman buries the remains of her husband in a stone sracophagus in Northern Roman Britain.
1207: A man in desperate need of money plans a new street to be called Briggate.
1645: A girl named Alice Musgrave of Vicar Lane is the first victim when the plague strikes Leeds.
1850: A heartbroken woman walks down a set of steps into the River Aire.
1963: Two young men, fired by the new music, wait to see the Beatles at the Queen's Hall.
These and more than twenty other stories make up Leeds, The Biography. It's history, but it's more. It's stories of the people and places in the city. The Battle of Holbeck Moor, the remnants of Ralph Thoresby's wonderous museum. How Leeds grew from being a tiny settlement around a river ford to one of Britain's greatest cities. It's human history. Based on fact, events, sometimes on tales. It's the past come to life in faces and speech you'll know as if they lived next door.
It's a history of Leeds in short stories It's all of us. Who we were. Hands stretching back across time.
Chris Nickson Books
Why John Lake Chose: Chris is an extremely prolific writer with a solid fan base, so when he agreed to publish these stories with Armley Press it was frankly a no brainer. The secret of Chris's success is the combination of encyclopaedic research into his subjects and an imagination that moulds characters and drama from his discoveries. The way he puts it is that the figures from history tell him their own stories and he simply writes them down. There you go then - talented and modest with it. Leeds, The Biography is stirring stuff and every bit as gripping as his historical crime thrillers.
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