A new collection of short stories from the acclaimed South Shields writer Alex Ferguson, again focusing on the author's part-real part-mythical Uncle Freddie, and again located in the Jarrow of the 1940s where the author grew up. Ferguson's writing is a unique amalgam of the starkly real – the terrible poverty of wartime Tyneside, and the surreally imaginative – meeting such famous characters as the Prince of Wales or Joe Stalin upstairs on a no.38 bus en route to Hebburn. Iron Press published Ferguson's story collection The Pineapple King of Jarrow in 2004, which rapidly sold out. That work was dramatised by the award-winning BBC Radio Four producer Melanie Harris, who is again planning to dramatise the new collection, this time for the stage with her own successful indie production company CrossLab Productions. Alex Ferguson was born in Jarrow and lives in South Shields, Tyneside. He has won a Guinness National Theatre Award, a Writers' Guild Award for comedy, a Sony Nomination for Creative Radio Writing and a Royal Television Society nomination for his film Lads!