Chris Upton trawls the shelves for the books with some of finest local tales to tell.

Since the rise in VAT has seriously undermined your spending power on white goods, black goods and any other colour of goods, you may as well buy a (non-VAT-able) book.

This is, by the way, not my cunning way of inducing you to purchase one of mine, although (as it happens) Living Back to Back was released as a paperback quite recently. Rather, it’s my cue to recommend a few of the books issued by the local history presses over the last year. It has been something of a vintage year (or I’ve been visiting too many bookshops), so I may well have to take two weeks!

Last year being the year of Cardinal Newman’s beatification, I felt duty-bound to go out and buy one book on the up-and-coming saint, and found Waterstone’s piled high with new publications on him.

I came to the opinion that the one by John Cornwell, Newman’s Unquiet Grave, (Continuum £18.99), was by far the best. The danger is, at times of beatification, that the hagiography can get in the way of the history. Not so here.

I am, I confess, no theologian, but Cornwell’s reflective mix of journalism and academic theology helped my understanding of Newman considerably.

And by tackling head-on and intelligently both the tricky issue of Newman’s alledged homosexuality, and his own attitude to miracles, Cornwell makes this a piece of 21st-century scholarship, not just a biography of an eminent Victorian. For the first time, I began to understand what all the fuss was about.

Local history can generate all kinds of books, but one of the best things it can do is to draw local attention to what is forgotten or endangered. Chris Smith’s Tales from a Churchyard: St John’s, Kates Hill, Dudley, (Arcos, £8.99), does just this. The Anglican church at Kates Hill is decidedly at risk, and all proceeds from the book go towards the campaign to save it.

I’ve always enjoyed this kind of publication, not an architectural study (St John’s would probably not merit that) but an introduction to some of the stories buried in the graveyard. It’s here that one begins to appreciate the church’s role in the community.

Every gravestone tells a story, of course, but Chris Smith has unearthed a fascinating collection of individuals from a place that, on the surface, did not appear to promise much. Below ground it’s much more interesting.

The headline act, I imagine, would be William Perry, commonly known as the Tipton Slasher, but sharing his soil is an influential educationalist, a Dambuster and a brewing magnate, to name just a few. Though long dead, they stand hand-in-hand with the members of the St John’s Preservation Society to protect this important piece of Dudley’s history.