Bean: 220 books

1850, and Europe’s most feared terrorist is hiding in Dean Street, Soho. Broke, restless and horny, the thirty-two-year-old revolutionary is a frothing combination of intellectual brilliance, invective, satiric wit, and child-like emotional illiteracy. Creditors, spies, rival revolutionary factions...

The life of Darrel Ascough, a Hull trawlerman, is played out in three acts in the crew's quarters of a distant water trawler: First, at sixteen, Darrel is a deckie learner on the Kingston Jet. Here he meets Hull's ‘one man circus’ Cassidy, and is introduced to his legacy.On the James Joyce, and...

On 14th May 1875 Lord Primrose Agar, drunk as a skunk, wagered one of his tenant farmers, Orlando Harrison, that his border collie pup Jip would outlive the 94 year-old Harrison. The prize would be 82 acres of up and down known as Kilham Wold Farm, near Driffiels in East Yorkshire. Thirteen years...

Lee, a soldier returning to Hull from two tours of Afghanistan, joins a losing pub quiz team. The team is: Lee, specialist subject - 'how to kill a man with your bare hands'; Woody, specialist subject - 'hallucinogenic drugs'; and Bunny, specialist subject - 'the containerisation of Hull docks'! What...

Dylan isn't your typical snooker player. He's a vegetarian, for starters. This is the biggest week of his life and everybody wants a piece of him: -his ex-con Dad, local gangster Waxy Chuff, and the snooker corruption squad. From the author of One Man, Two Guvnors, this is a laugh-out-loud comedy/thriller about love, honor, and not getting snookered.

Hapless MEP Philip Wardrobe has a busy day ahead of him, balancing his less-than-irreproachable political career with his attempts to start a family. As he prepares for his girlfriend to fly in from Kettering for an afternoon of fertile frolics, his plan to be voted President of the European Parliament...

Why has middle manager Stephen England got up in the night and defecated on the living room carpet? His wife Judith doesn’t know, nor does his mother Irene. Only Andy, the gauche youth who regularly turns up uninvited to borrow his power tools, can save him (or destroy him). Mr England was produced at the Sheffield Crucible, October 2000.

April 1642. Sir John Hotham, Governor of Hull, Member for Beverley and owner of most of East Yorkshire is charged by Parliament to secure the arsenal at Hull and deny entry to King Charles I. If only it were that simple. With a Royalist siege outside the city walls and the rebellion of the...

A brilliantly moving and funny play from the writer of the award-winning Under the Whaleback, Harvest and One Man, Two Guvnors. Another Sunday night shift. The smell of bread baking. The industrial thump, thump, thump of the machines that never stop. The ovens are cranked up to full blast,...

‘The borders don't make any sense, there's no rule of law, no running water, you never know when the electric's on, the last war's fucked everything, and the next war will fuck everything else.’ A dark and deeply funny tale of foreign aid workers in far-flung Tambia... Truly alternative...

Fists upon a Star is the hard-hitting memoir of Florence James, a pioneering American theatre director, whose devastating experience with McCarthyism led her to flee to Canada. The memoir is as epic as America itself. Born in 1892 in the frontier society of Idaho, she became a suffragette in New York...

This book is the outcome of an idea, and the idea is very simple. It is that the best way to understand the dramatic transformation any idea can bring and to successfully bring ideas across, is to think of them as profound insights and moments of clarity often disguised as wit, captured in one single...

Being the one and only Kid-Zillionaire on planet means Benji Franklin has to have out-of-this-world problem solving skills. But his creative talents are put to the ultimate test when the President of the United States asks Benji to stop a meteorite headed right for Earth! Can Benji make the high-impact decisions required to stop this space rock from flattening his home planet?

While "helping" his mother with holiday housecleaning, a boy keeps a watchful eye on the progress of a winter storm. He's hoping for a big snow. A really big snow. Inside, he is underfoot, turning sheet-changing and tub-scrubbing into imaginary whiteouts. Outside, flakes are flying. But...