Yorkshire Day – Ten Novels Set in Yorkshire

Today is Yorkshire Day, an annual celebration to promote the historic English county of Yorkshire. Inaugurated by The Yorkshire Ridings Society in 1975, amongst other things, it marks the day the Slavery Abolition Act 1833 was passed, something campaigned for by William Wilberforce, a Yorkshire Member of Parliament. (Today also happens to be my husband’s birthday. He likes to say he was born in Yorkshire although he wasn’t, but his mother was.)

To mark Yorkshire Day, here are ten novels set in that county. Links from the title will take you to my review of the book description on Goodreads.

1. The Gallows Pole by Benjamin Myers – Describes the exploits of a gang known as the ‘Cragg Vale Coiners’ in Calderdale, West Yorkshire in the 1760s
2. Behind the Scenes at the Museum by Kate Atkinson – Ruby Lennox narrates her life starting with her birth in a flat above a pet shop in an ancient street near York Minster
3. The Crowded Street by Winifred Holtby – The story of twenty-year-old Muriel Hammond, living within the suffocating confines of Edwardian middle-class society in a Yorkshire village
4. The Vanished Bride by Bella Ellis – When a young wife and mother goes missing, the Brontë sisters of Haworth turn detective
5. A Kestrel for a Knave by Barry Hines – Troubled teenager Billy Casper, growing up in the small Yorkshire mining town of Barnsley, discovers a new passion in life when he finds Kes, a kestrel hawk 
6. The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett – Mary Lennox, lonely and unwanted, arrives from India to live with her uncle in a gloomy house in Yorkshire
7. Sovereign (Matthew Shardlake #3) by C. J. Samson – Shardlake investigates the murder of a York glazier during King Henry VIII’s Progress to the North in 1541
8. The Year of the Runaways by Sanjeev Sahota – Three young men and one woman who have journeyed from India to England find themselves sharing a dilapidated house in Sheffield
9. Gallows View (Inspector Banks #1) by Peter Robinson – Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks, recently moved to the Yorkshire Dales from London, finds life in the country not quite as idyllic as he imagined
10. The Coffin Path by Katherine Clements – Set on the Yorkshire moors, a story of ancient curses, family secrets and a crumbling old house reached only by an ancient track called the coffin path