Final line-up for Parallel Dimensions (16th Oct, 2pm, West Kirby Library): Carol Falaki; Adrienne Odasso; Colin P Davies; Tim Hulme; Peter Hurd; Peter Caton; Adele Cosgrove-Bray.

  Parallel Dimensions returns for its second year to bring together some of the UK's strongest emerging writers of the Fantasy, Horror and Science-Fiction genres. Colin P Davies , Adele Cosgrove-Bray , Carol Falaki and Adrienne Odasso will share new fiction with their audience. Last year's lively Q&A session, which followed the readings, proved very popular. Colin has seen over forty of his short stories published in anthologies and magazines. He is the author of The Bookmole , a novel whose sequel is due out soon. His illustrations have also appeared in international genre magazines. Adele Cosgrove-Bray's short stories appear in various anthologies published by Hadley Rille Books and Dark Moon Press. Her non-fiction writings have been featured in Prediction Magazine and Your Future . She is currently writing her forth in a series of Dark Fantasy novels set in Wirral and Liverpool. Carol Falaki's first novel, Birth in Suburbia draws on her profession...

The colours on Caldy Hill are changing to an autumnal palette now.   Mushrooms and toadstools blossom from beneath a growing carpet of fallen leaves, and the feisty rustlings of foraging squirrels send showers of pine cones to the damp, peaty ground.  The quality of light changes everything, from the soft green-golds filtering through arching branches of oak and rowan, to the hard glitter of silver-greys bouncing off the River Dee.  Bees hummed over the last of the purple heather on the summit, and the faerie pond lower down - dry during the summer months - begins to look more marshy as it slowly refills.  And on the narrow path, threaded with roots and sandstone rocks, overhung with ripe blackberries and peeling silver birch, lay one tiny lizard, another victim of bicycle wheels, still struggling to crawl away to die beneath the trees.

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"...The (V&A's) new doll archive: rows of stark grey metal shelves, from which dozens of bisque, wax, wooden and vinyl faces stare out...   (One) has articulated legs and arms, so its owner could walk it about the room (move a leg and the arms move robotically in time); it has luxuriant and adult-looking blond curls that I am loath to touch.  Most curiously of all, inside its rosebud mouth is a row of tiny white teeth, pointy and sharp." by Rachel Cooke. Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/aug/29/doll-face-museum-childhood-review "What, another doll?" The Drawing Room, with a Whole Lotta Sewin' Goin' On. Now everyone recycles, Wombles had to get another job. My three-storey Georgian dolls house in its entirety. I've always liked dolls.  Walk around my house, and this would be self-evident.  I have three dolls' houses.  Well, two houses and one shop, to be precise, in various stages of completion.  Sev...

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