Welcome To Five Leaves Publications
Five Leaves: Five Leaves is a small publisher based in Nottingham, publishing 15 or so books a year. Our roots are radical and literary. These days our main areas of interest are fiction and poetry, social history, Jewish secular culture, with side orders of Romani, young adult, Catalan and crime fiction titles. You can find our latest and forthcoming books below, backlist section by section, and order books through a secure site run by Inpress. Our books are also available from bookshops and internet sites including The Book Depository and Amazon. If in London, you will find most of our books in stock at Housmans Bookshop, 5 Caledonian Road, five minutes from Kings Cross.
Blog: Five Leaves independant publishing blog also online at:
www.fiveleavespublications.blogspot.com
Submissions: Five Leaves' books are usually commissioned. We regret that we are not be able to read or consider unsolicited manuscripts.
Stop press: On October 2nd, Five Leaves and other Nottinghamshire organisations is celebrating the life of our friend Alan Sillitoe with a day event entitled “Whatever people say I am, that’s what I’m not”. The day’s speakers include David Sillitoe, John Harvey, Gwen Grant, Nicola Monaghan, DJ Taylor, Derrick Buttress, John Lucas and others. We’ll be covering everything from cartography (one of Alan’s big interests) though to the performance of music inspired by his books., as well as looking at other working class writers from Nottingham. All good stuff. Email us if you would like a full programme.
The BBC Radio 4 recently ran a programme on Manchester Writers - Walter Greenwood, Howard Fast and Louis Golding. We sold our remaining stock of Magnolia Street by Golding within days, with dozens of orders coming in from across the country. An immediate reprint was ordered.
Also on Radio 4, on August 31, Happy Campers! We had brought forward availability of Goodnight Campers! by Dennis Hardy and Colin Ward for the great memorial meeting for the latter. Dennis has been interviewed for the radio programme, along with, amongst others, Status Quo. We look forward to our history of the British holiday camp selling as well as Status Quo records in the future.
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Latest Publications:
The 1950s are often seen as the “grey decade”, marred by austerity, rationing and conformity. True, but Next Year Will Be Better also tells of skiffle, jazz, CND, Teds, the Angry Young Men, new movements in art and literature. Meanwhile there was work to be had, on building sites and on holiday camps. And there was the joys of Eel Pie Island, Soho, hearing Louis Armstrong, playing jazz and being kissed by Alan Ginsberg.
"Only a dedicated sourpuss could fail to be swept along by Lucas’s zest and intelligence" - The Spectator
John Lucas is an Emeritus Professor at the Universities of
Loughborough and Nottingham. His 92 Acharnon Street won
the Authors Club Dolman Prize for Travel Writing and was
reviewed everywhere. He is the author of over forty books of
poetry, social history and criticism and is the editor at
Shoestring Press.
This highly illustrated book traces the development of the British holiday camp from its origins a century ago through the 1930s and 1940s pioneer camps to the golden years of the Pontin, Butlin and Warner camps of the 1950s and 1960s. Holiday camps declined with cheap overseas travel but are now making an unlikely comeback. Goodnight Campers! captures the memories of the glory years when holiday camps offered a promise of freedom, health, family fun and an enticing hint of romance. Dennis Hardy brings the story up to date.
Colin Ward is the author of over thirty books on utopian history and unofficial uses of the countryside. He died in 2010, resulting in obituaries in every single broadsheet and specialist journals ranging from architecture to transport. Dennis Hardy is Professor of Utopian History at Middlesex University. Together with Colin Ward he has written Arcadia for All: the legacy of a makeshift landscape. His other books include Alternative Communities in Nineteenth-Century England; Utopian England and books on the New Towns.
It is 1834 and James Brine is bound for Australia on a convict ship. His crime is joining with other men to ask for fair pay. His punishment is transportation – seven long years far from everything he knows and loves. Can James survive the hardships of convict life? And will he ever see his beloved Elizabeth again?
"I really enjoyed reading this novel" - TEEN TITLES
Alan James Brown is the author of several children’s books for
different ages, including I Am a Dog (Red Fox) and Sword and
Sorcery (Hodder). He lives with the children’s writer Berlie
Doherty in Derbyshire, where he also plays folk music. He
regularly leads creative writing classes for children.
This CD collects seventeen of the best known and best loved poems by the former Poet Laureate C. Day-Lewis, including “Walking Away” and “The House Where I Was Born”. The poems are read by his widow, the late Jill Balcon, who introduces each poem. The collection ranges from C. Day- Lewis’ pastoral lyrics to the more political work of the 1930s and his more reflective and personal work of his later years.
C. Day-Lewis, with WH Auden, Stephen Spender and Louis MacNeice, was one of the key poets of the 1930s, After the war he became a popular broadcaster. In the fifties he was Professor of Poetry at Oxford University and was later made a Companion of Literature by the Royal Society of Literature. He was Chair of the Arts Council Literature Panel and a member of the Irish Academy of Letters. C. Day-Lewis was Poet Laureate from 1968 until his death in 1972.
This is the only CD of C. Day-Lewis poetry available.
Jill Balcon’s audio-books ranged from Carol An Duffy’s The World’s Wife to Claire Tomalin’s Samuel Pepys. Her television and film credits ranged from The Sweeney to Derek Jarman’s films. Her 60 years as an actress were celebrated by a BBC play, Deadheading Roses which also featured her son, Daniel Day-Lewis.
Old City: New Rumours is an anthology of work by poets who have lived or worked in Hull, a city described by Philip Larkin as having ‘a different resonance.’ The collection is a sequel to the influential 1982 collection A Newly Rumoured City (Ed. Douglas Dunn, with a foreword by Philip Larkin). New work by all the poets featured in that 1982 collection are included as are other poets including Andrew Motion, Grace Nichols, David Wheatley and Douglas Dunn himself.
Philip Larkin died 25 years ago and commemorations are being held in Hull during the summer of 2010. This exciting publication celebrates Larkin 25, but it will be read long afterwards.
With contributions from: Sean O’Brien, Andrew Motion, Tom
Paulin, Roger McGough...
Carol Rumens was the Director of the Philip Larkin Centre
between 2006/7. She has been published regularly since 1973,
mostly poetry but she has had one novel published and several
plays performed. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature
and Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Hull.
Ian Gregson is a poet and critic. His poetry is published by Salt,
his other books include Character and Satire in Post-War Fiction
(Continuum). He was included in the 1982 Hull collection.
Ian Gregson and Carol Rumens also teach at the University of
Bangor.
John Lucas’ ninth full collection of poetry begins with a long poem echoing Auden’s “Letter to Lord Byron”, and discusses love, art, politics, social class and the industrial midlands. He then moves on to wars, ancient and modern, concluding with Lucas’ alter-ego, Thorn Gruin, moaning pitifully as always.
A modern poet who, something of a rarity, talks about class and politics as well as love and art. Lucas’ craft has been developed over five decades of being published
"Lucas is a first rate craftsman" - Platform
Of his previous work, Ambit spoke of "the deep humanity running through the book… and a happy determination to get to grips with the messiness of everyday life."
John Lucas is a major modern poet who has written for all the leading literary journals of the day, including London Review of Books, Poetry Review and the Times Literary Supplement. He was the poetry editor of the New Statesman for ten years. This is his ninth collection of poetry. He has also translated the Everyman Classic Egils Saga. His 92 Achernon Street won the Authors Club Dolman Prize for Travel Writing.
How far would you go to be a hero? Beth is appalled when she discovers that her school is going to be closed down, against the wishes of the students and parents. Nate, the new boy, thinks that the students could take over the school and run it themselves, just as a protest. But things get out of hand and some of the other students have less than idealistic reasons for taking part in “the revolution”. Nate and Beth fall for one another, but will their teen love affair survive?
Revolution is Sherry Ashworth’s ninth book for young adults. She
has also written for younger children and has had several books
for adults published. Her previous young adult books have won
the North East Book Award, the Leicester Book of the Year
Award and the South Lanarkshire Book Award. She teaches
creative writing at Manchester Metropolitan University.
Holly and Marilyn are both 16. Holly is dissatisfied with life. She hangs round with her gay best friend Kyle and tries to avoid her mother as much as possible. Meanwhile Marilyn sleeps in rollers and dresses like her mother and does what she is told. Holly fancies the guy who has just moved in opposite, but Marilyn is not sure about sex at all. Holly lives in 2009, Marilyn lives in 1962 – the same house. Just suppose they swapped places...
A fresh and funny début novel about freedom, expectations and how, just maybe, you can be what you want to be
Maxine Linnell trained as a psychotherapist and later gained at distinction in the Nottingham Trent University MA in Creative Writing. She lives in Leicester where she chairs Leicester Writers Club, an organisation of published writers.
Tim South is fifteen and finding real life uncomfortable compared to his imagination. Hanging round with tough guys only makes things worse. At home he finds an old picture that looks like him and becomes obsessed with discovering who was in the picture, sparking off a life changing series of events.
"This wonderful book... makes adolescent problems real, the Brontës human, and book-reading delightful, in a style which is sustaining, intriguing, yet easy and memorable." - SCHOOL LIBRARIAN
"a fine yarn, full of humour, insight and well-observed detail" - TES
Robert Swindells is a past winner of the Carnegie Medal, the Sheffield Children’s Book Award and he won the Children’s Book Award twice, with Brothers in the Land and Room 13. He lives on the Yorkshire Moors and is a full time writer.
Staying with their father in a bizarre Gothic house in a sinister wood - land, Megan and her younger brother, Brand, are struggling to come to terms with their grief and guilt over their mother’s recent death. But the house harbours its own secrets, and soon Megan and Brand find themselves on a quest to find a priceless violin, and the truth about a young woman wrongly accused of witchcraft three centuries ago. Mega and Brand discover they can put right the mistakes of the past – but only if they choose to accept a dangerous bargain.
Winner of the Fidler First Novel Award, shortlisted for the Sheffield children’s book prize.
Gill Vickery lives in Lutterworth, Leicestershire. This is her début novel. She has worked as a teacher, an auxiliary nurse and a packer in a chocolate factory. She is currently working on a follow up novel to The Ivy Crown.
"a satisfying cake of a story with some rich ingredients." - CAROUSEL
This novella tells the story of Johnny and Diane Laski, a sculptor and his wife, and their attempt to bring a new life into the world, during a cold Maine winter, deep in the country.
William Kotzwinkle tells the story of the couple’s night drive to the hospital, their long labour, and their ultimately, unsuccessful breech birth. Unafraid of his subject, Kotzwinkle destroys any sentimental illusions about the beauty of childbirth or the distance of birth from death; he reminds us of how closely the two are intertwined, of the frightening power of the life force, and of the unpredictability and uncanniness of death.
And yet, his small book is not without hope.
"A beautiful piece of work... the economy of the writing and the matter-of-fact acceptance make it immensely moving" - The Daily Telegraph
"Swimming in the Secret Sea is a deeply moving book. The textures of its delicately conveyed anguish, simplicity make its grief all the more stunning." - Publishers Weekly
"Swimmer in the Secret Sea reveals a depth of emotion and an immensity of feeling seldom seen in American writers today."
- The San Francisco Review of Books
William Kotzwinkle, well-known for his many enduring children's books such as Trouble in Bugland and his novelisation of the movie E.T. The Extraterrestrial, is equally adept at writing seriously and poetically about life in extremis. He is also well known in the UK for his adult novel Fata Morgana and Dr. Rat.
Introduction by George Szirtes, winner of the TS Eliot poetry prize
Reznikoff’s subject is one people’s suffering at the hand of another. His source materials are the U.S. government’s record of the trials of the Nazi criminals before the Nuremberg Military Tribunal and the transcripts of the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem.
Except for the twelve part titles, none of the words here are Reznikoff’s own: instead he has created, through selection, arrangement, and the rhythms of the testimony set as verse on the page, a poem of witness by the perpetrators and the survivors of the Holocaust themselves. He lets the terrible history unfold – in history’s own words.
"…Reznikoff is the quintessential poet of New York City and one of the key figures in Jewish-American poetry. A writer of astonishing insight and unsurpassable charm, his poems endeavour to make visible much that usually goes unnoticed." - Publisher’s Weekly USA
"When we come to the end of Holocaust we want to find a place to be sick…No poet has ever written a book so nakedly shocking… One marvels at the courage Reznikoff must have drawn upon to write it."
- Anne Stevenson
"His Auschwitz was not… William Styron's "fatal embolism in the bloodstream of mankind," but a real place where men and women lived and died without witnesses, and mourners." - Sylvia Rothchild
Charles Reznikoff was born August, 1894, in Brooklyn, New York. His parents were Russian Jewish immigrants who fled the pogroms that followed the assassination of Alexander II. He was a blood-and-bone New Yorker, a collector of images and stories who walked the city from Bronx to Battery and breathed the soul of the Jewish immigrant experience into a lifetime of poetry. He died in 1976; one year after this book was first published in the USA.
Forthcoming Titles:
From Pogrom to Purge:
Soviet Yiddish Writing 1917-1947
Edited by
Joseph Sherman
ISBN: 978-1905512621, 260 pages
£9.99
Delayed - click here to pre-order
+ click here for more info
The thirty years between the Russian Revolution and Stalin’s destruction of Yiddish culture produced some of the best 20th C writing in Yiddish. Brilliant avant-garde work challenged the best of European modernism during the 1920s. This was stamped out in the 1930s by Stalin’s repressive demand for “socialist realism”. The greatest challenge to Yiddish writing under Stalinism came during World War II when Soviet policy insisted that German atrocities did not single out the Jews for special extermination but applied equally to all Soviet citizens. Jewish writers in the USSR, well aware of the extent of the Holocaust, had to find ways to express their horror and grief without falling foul of the official Soviet censorship. The results were remarkable.
Remarkable stories from the forgotten world of Soviet Yiddish writing during World War II.
Jewish writers in the USSR, aware of the extent of the Holocaust, find ways to express their horror and grief without falling foul of the official Soviet censorship o An important book for anyone interested in Soviet or Jewish literature.
We regret to announce that Joseph Sherman died in March of 2009. His book will now be published in February 2010 with a foreword by Gennady Estraikh.
Joseph Sherman taughts at the Oriental Institute, Oxford. He edited a number of books on Yiddish literature and wrote regularly for the Times Literary Supplement.
The Soviet writers include: David Bergelson, Peretz Markis, and Dovid Hofshteyn.
Camberton’s second novel is a coming of age portrayal of “down Hackney”, home of David Hirsch, who steadily leaves behind his Jewish upbringing in adolescence to explore the wider world of London. Typically there is wide array of humorous characters in his portrayal of Hackney and the more cosmopolitan world Hirsch is drawn towards.
Original cover by John Minton re-used
Roland Camberton (Henry Cohen) was born in Manchester in
1921 and was educated in Hackney. After RAF service he worked
in various jobs. After his second novel, Rain on the Pavements he
vanished almost without trace, publishing nothing more. His
daughter, who he never met, lives in London.
London by night in the 1940s. The decaying back streets of Soho and the, then, sad but elegant squares of Bloomsbury provide the backdrop for a range of characters, making a living – or not making a living – in dubious way in this satirical novel. Ivan Ginsberg tries to escape his failure by setting up a literary magazine, Scamp. The book is introduced by Iain Sinclair who spent decades trying to trace the mysterious Roland Camberton, whose life was as strange as many of his characters.
Original cover by John Minton re-used.
Roland Camberton (Henry Cohen) was born in Manchester in 1921
and was educated in Hackney. After RAF service he worked in
various jobs. After his second novel, Rain on the Pavements he
vanished almost without trace, publishing nothing more. His
daughter, who he never met, lives in London.
The Rose Fyleman Fairy Book
illustrated by
Hilda Miller
ISBN: 978-1905512973, 120p pages
£14.99
Due August 2010
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A facsimile of the 1923 Methuen edition. Rose Fyleman’s lovingly illustrated fairy book has been out of print for decades, and currently sells for three figures on-line. This is a whimsical book, for all who remember the author’s phrase “There are fairies at the bottom of our garden...”
Rose Fyleman, born in Nottingham, was a popular writer of
stories and poetry for children. She died in 1957. Her work —
and that of the illustrator Hilda Miller — lives on in fairy sites
all over the internet.
The Golem of old prague
by
Michael Rosen,
Illustrated
by Brian Simons
ISBN: 978-1905512911, 360 pages
£5.99
Due November 2010
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Times were dangerous for the Jews of Old Prague. Rabbi Loeb needed help to save people from his enemies. Out of mud he fashioned a Golem, a creature of great strength who could perform impossible tasks, but could also cause disaster if the he got out of control. The Golem tales are as mysteriously eerie as the streets were in the old Prague ghetto, but the realism of the humour gives a reassuring earthiness.
Michael Rosen’s work for radio and television includes writing and presenting for BBC Radio 3 and 4 and for the BBC World Service, including the Treasure Islands, Best Words, Meridian Books and Word of Mouth programmes. He won a Sony Radio Gold Award for his series On Saying Goodbye. He is a prolific writer and a fellow of the English Association and the Royal Society of Literature. He was appointed Children’s Laureate for 2007-2009. Brian Simons is a teacher and illustrator who lives on Stamford Hill in London.
Penny Lace
by
Hilda Lewis
ISBN: 978-1905512966, 296 pages
£11.99
Due August 2010
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The first book in Bromley House Editions, reprinting important Nottinghamshire writers from the past. A gritty historical novel set in the lace industry. Mr Penny, who works on the factory floor, hates the mill masters, so much so that he learns the trade and sets up on his own outside of Nottingham, outside of the reach of trade unions. He undercuts the old fashioned bosses, becoming a rich man and marrying his old boss’s daughter.
"Well documented historical fiction" - Observer
"Hilda Lewis is a born storyteller" - Yorkshire Post
Hilda Lewis is well known from her OUP children’s classic, The Ship that Flew. Several of her other historical fiction books are now available from The History Press/NPI
Personal Copy
by
Ray Gosling
ISBN: 978-1905512997, 256 pages
£8.99
Due October 2010
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"We’d a lot of fun in those tumbledown days. Hippies playing at being parish priests."
Personal Copy is Ray Gosling’s memoir of the 1960s. He writes about building and losing a youth centre in Leicester, trying to do things differently before retreating, bruised, to Nottingham. He made his name fighting to save the best houses and demolish the worst of the St Anns slums, which were home to 50,000 people, 500 shops and 50 pubs. Along the way he wrote pamphlets for the Fabians, stood for election (“Vote for a madman”) and was involved with major figures from the ’60s including his hero Colin MacInnes.
His memoir captures the mood – or rather moods of the time: pill popping; tribal Labour voting; class-divided Britain; home to a new generation of immigrants with their blues clubs. He writes of the cafés, pubs and life on the streets. Speakers’ corner, the Sally Bash and the Communists in the Square on Sundays, crumbling Victorian mansions, overcrowding, allotments, the new art gallery, the backstreet lesbian bars… Ray Gosling describes his adopted city, still his home.
Ray Gosling made over 100 TV documentaries and over 1,000
radio programmes, concentrating on the eccentric and the everyday
activities of the people in the street. Now in his 70s he returned to
national attention in 2010 when he revealed on television that he
had a pact to kill a dying friend – a lover who was dying with AIDS
and in terrible pain. Ray Gosling is currently writing a full
autobiography.
Rosie Hogarth
by
Alexander Baron
Introduced by
Andrew Whitehead
ISBN: 978-1905512980, 360 pages
£9.99
Due November 2010
+ click here for more info
In the spring of 1949, Jack Agass belatedly returns from the war to the working class street in Islington where he grew up. A proud, supportive community — with a pub and a barber shop, and a common love of The Arsenal. But the street has changed. Jack eventually finds his footing but he’s haunted by a yearning for his old childhood friend Rosie Hogarth, and for the pre-war security and certainties she represents. Rosie has moved out and up — living bohemian-style in Bloomsbury. He thinks she’s selling sex, but is he right?
A taut and very human drama is played out through the summer and autumn of the year. In his first London novel, Alexander Baron provides one of the most powerful and compassionate evocations of a working class community in the throes of profound change.
Alexander Baron wrote many novels and books of short stories, including the classic war novel From the City, >From the Plough and classic Hackney book of the 60s, The Lowlife (both recently republished by Black Spring). His novel King Dido is published by Five Leaves. By the 1960s he had become a regular writer on BBC’s Play for Today. He also wrote for drama serials like Poldark and A Horseman Riding By and wrote two Hollywood screenplays.
Rosie Hogarth is introduced by Andrew Whitehead, who works for the BBC World Service and is a former BBC political
and Indian correspondent.
