24 Books for Yorkshire

About this list

A lot of English fiction is set in Yorkshire: the moors, the Dales, the coast, the mill and mining towns. Our Yorkshire trip reads a Brontë. This list is the rest of Yorkshire's writing.

It is for book clubs and readers who want to know the county from the page, whether or not you are planning a trip.

Heathcliff, Dracula and Brideshead (Yorkshire, England) — See the 2–10 October 2027 trip →

The trip reads a Brontë. This list is everything else Yorkshire wrote.

1. The Landscape

   Books where the moors, Dales and hills are central to the story. Elmet (Fiona Mozley): a father and two children living off-grid in a Yorkshire copse; shortlisted for the 2017 Booker Prize. A Kestrel for a Knave (Barry Hines): a boy and a kestrel in a South Yorkshire mining town. Walking Home (Simon Armitage): the poet, now Poet Laureate, walks the Pennine Way south from the Scottish border toward his home county, paying his way with a poetry reading each night. Reservoir 13 (Jon McGregor): a girl goes missing from a moorland village, and the book follows the village through thirteen years. Strictly, it is set in the Peak District rather than Yorkshire, but it is the same Pennine country.

2. The Gothic

   Bram Stoker stayed in Whitby in 1890 and set Dracula's arrival in England there: the ruins of Whitby Abbey, the churchyard on the cliff, the steps up from the harbour. You can walk all three. A.S. Byatt's Possession is not a Gothic novel, but it sends its two modern scholars to Yorkshire to retrace a trip its two Victorian poets made there in secret.

3. The Crime

   Every July, Harrogate hosts the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival at the Old Swan Hotel, billed as the largest crime-writing festival in Europe. Peter Robinson's Inspector Banks novels are set in the Yorkshire Dales. Start with In a Dry Season, where a drought empties a reservoir and uncovers a drowned village and a skeleton. Reginald Hill's Dalziel and Pascoe novels are set in a fictional "Mid-Yorkshire". Kate Atkinson was born in York, and her Jackson Brodie is a Yorkshireman. Ann Cleeves' Vera books are set just over the border in Northumberland, but they sit well alongside the others.

4. Work and Politics

   Yorkshire's political and working-class history in fiction. Winifred Holtby's South Riding (1936): a county council in the 1930s, a new headmistress, and the fight over who pays for reform, set in a fictional version of the East Riding. David Peace's GB84: the 1984–85 miners' strike, much of it in the Yorkshire coalfield. Peace grew up in West Yorkshire.