About Us

Manchester Books publishes titles on a range of subjects and themes about the city and the north. Each book we publish seeks to inform, entertain… and occasionally challenge received wisdom.

We currently have six titles, four about the city and region, all full colour, all written with verve.

The best-selling Manchester: A Comprehensive Guide is the only true guidebook to the city revealing its lively story past, present and future. Two sister books are Lost & Imagined Manchester and Illusion & Change Manchester which explore some of the amazing buildings we’ve lost, but uniquely, also reveal some of the extraordinary buildings and schemes which were proposed but never completed. Our book Afflecks is a tribute to the Manchester shopping institution, now four decades old. This fabulous ‘bazaar’ is celebrated through the words of customers and stall-holders both famous and not so famous.

We also have a couple of food and drink books. Crispy Squirrel and Vimto Trifle, is a glorious tribute to the life of a local chef of genius; Robert Owen Brown. The recipes are practical and the stories wonderful. Finally, we have Chateau Musar: Serge Hochar, a wine, a family and a land with the colourful Lebanese story of one of the great wine-makers operating in a politically challenging part of the world.

In 1912 Judge Parry, a man who had settled in Manchester, wrote of his adopted city:

‘For Manchester is the place where people do things…”Don’t talk about what you are going to do – do it”. That is the Manchester habit. And in the past through the manifestation of this quality the word Manchester has become a synonym for energy and freedom and the right to do and to think without shackles.’

In the 1970s comedian Les Dawson said:

“There is an energy about Manchester that seems lacking in other cities, and if you see what the pigeons can do to a statue in Albert Square, the birds have it too.”

Manchester Books will encapsulate all of this in its books: it will capture the best of the region, its achievement, its future but also its humour and character.