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

Harry Preston says goodbye to the provinces and comes to London looking for life and adventure. It is the mid-50s and he soon finds himself in the impoverished and slightly seedy world of the emerging Beat Generation. As he progresses through the ranks of would-be artists and deluded romantics of Soho and Notting Hill, he begins to make sense of the world and his role in it. Colin Wilson’s second, and most autobiographical novel. Currently being filmed by Burning Films.

Colin Wilson is the author of over 100 books – novels, philosophical works, true crime, biography and the occult. His best known work was published when he was 24 and he now lives quietly in Cornwall with his collection of 30,000 books – as the Sunday Times put it: Still an Angry Man, Always the Outsider.

Described as the Holy Grail of Beatnik (and Mod) novels, Terry Taylor’s only published book, unavailable for decades, documents one summer in the life of the unnamed sixteen year-old narrator. Leaving his home and job he dabbles with spiritualism, is seduced by an older woman and moves into dealing dope. His London is sharp suits, jazz, drugs, “spades”, nightclubs, sex. Rare secondhand copies of the first edition have sold for £300+ on line.

Terry Taylor was the young lover of Ida Kar, whose National Portrait Gallery collection includes many images of the author (including a series of him getting stoned…). His exploits inspired Absolute Beginners and a life in which hallucogenic drugs featured large. He spent time in Goa and hung out with William Burroughs in Tangier before spending the 80s running a successful sandwich shop in Rhyl.

Joe Beckett drifts from job to job and woman to woman in a seedy
world of bedsitters and all-night cafes. Living in the wasteland
between Notting Hill and Earl’s Court, he heats up tins on gas
rings and smuggles girls past the landlady. He has no values or
beliefs. A chance encounter with a roadhouse braggart brings him
the opportunity to murder someone “to shock himself back to
life”.

The Furnished Room was filmed as West 11, starring Alfred Lynch
as Joe, Kathleen Breck as the good-time girl Isla and a cast
including Eric Portman and Diana Dors.

Laura Del-Rivo was an associate of Bill Hopkins and Colin Wilson, who described The Furnished Room as “one of the significant novels of the 1960s.” Unsurprisingly, she was convent educated but the call of Soho parties was stronger. After many jobs, including working as a bookseller, a Lyons’ counter hand and an art-school model she started running a market stall in Portobello Road, where she can still be found.

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

"...sharply observed memoir Next Year Will Be Better [is] an antidote to the Larkin-Amis view of the English 1950s that seems to dominate all social histories of the post-war period." - DJ Taylor, Times Literary Supplement

"...recalls in astonishing and celebratory details the sounds, tastes and smells of England in the 1950s, with particular attention paid to poetry and jazz." - Blake Morrison, Books of the Year, The Guardian

"...an entertaining account of growing up in the 1950s which charts, with an almost forensic precision, the process by which post-war austerity gave way to the comparative affluence of the Macmillan era." - Independent on Sunday

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.

A quirky compendium of essays on maps, places and people, many by leading writers including Iain Sinclair and The Guardian's David McKie and Chris Arnot as well as writers from the London Review of Books, academic journals, a journalist from the World Service and biographers.

Iain Sinclair - Walking Through Liverpool
Chris Arnot - Lost Cricket Grounds of England
David Belbin - Graham Greene in Nottingham
Ross Bradshaw & Ian Parks - The Land of Green Ginger
Andy Croft - Reading Poetry in Siberia
Richard Dennis - Mapping Gissing's Novels
Gillian Darley - Ian Nairn and Jack Kerouac: On the Road
Roberta Dewa - Wilford: An English Village in the 1950s
John Lucas - Uprisings in the South West
David McKie - The Mapping of Surnames
Deirdre O'Byrne - The Famine Roads of Ireland
John Payne - Death on the Border: Walter Benjamin
Mark Patterson - A Short Walk up Dere Street
Andrew Whitehead - Beyond Boundary Passage: London Fiction
Sara Jane Palmer - A Walk to Tafraoute
Paul Barker - The Other Britain: Leeds
Robert Macfarlane - The Guga Men

Throughout the 1930s, Oswald Mosley's Blackshirts increased their campaign against the Jewish community, particularly in London's East End. As their campaign became more overtly anti-Semitic the Jewish community debated how to deal with the Fascist threat, building their own defence organisations, culminating in the Battle of Cable Street when more than 100,000 Jews, Irish and others came out to stop Mosley marching into the East End.

David Rosenberg leads guided walks round the East End. He has written several articles on history and current affairs for Channel 4 websites. He is a freelance contributor to the Times Educational Supplement, Time Out and New Statesman. He is an active member of the National Union of Teachers. His previous books include Daily Racism: The Press and Black People in Britain (co-authored with Paul Gordon).

This book describes the famous clash of 1936 between police and anti-fascists when Sir Oswald Mosley and his Blackshirt army attempted to march through largely Jewish Stepney in East London. 100,000 people crowded the streets, barricades were erected and the area successfully defended. The story is partly told through the voices of those who took part. The authors also examine the political, economic and social conditions of the time - and its present day legacy.

The Cable Street Group came together initially to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Battle of Cable Street, publishing an early edition of this booklet, whose writers included Ruth Kelly, later Minister for Education. The group has celebrated the anniversary ever since with huge events on significant anniversaries, and the creation of the famous Mural.

There are other histories of Cable Street apart from the famous Battle. For a while it was a red-light area, Maltese gangsters tried to run the streets, local writers set up the Basement Writers and the film, To Sir, With Love, was shot there, based on a local head teacher. Meanwhile plays, carnivals and the huge Mural continued to celebrate the Battle of 1936. Part oral history, part investigation, the other stories of Cable Street are told in an unashamedly personal style.

The book includes long forgotten posters and ephemera

Roger Mills is the author of A Comprehensive Education, and two
novels for teenagers published by HarperCollins. He has written
freelance articles about London and oral history for many
educational and other papers, including The Guardian and has
been assistant editor of Rising East - the journal of East London
studies. He has been involved in activities around Cable
Street since the 1970s.

October Day is an extraordinary novel about an extraordinary event. It is a novel about the Battle of Cable Street, when 100,000 Londoners took to the streets on 4 October 1936 to prevent Oswald Mosley and the British Union of Fascists marching through the Jewish East End.

First published less than three years after the event, the central chapters of October Day are a vivid eye-witness record of a famous victory in the history of British anti-fascism.

The late Frank Griffin wrote a documentary on the life of a British
solder in the 1930s, which caused a national scandal. After the war
he wrote for socialist and trade union papers (and the News of the
World!). He also wrote a dozen thrillers and a book for teenagers.

Introduction by Andy Croft, author of books on the 1930s including Red Letter Days

Set in the East End of London in 1936, this is the story of an unlikely friendship between a Jewish and a Gentile boy during the upsurge of fascist violence led by Oswald Mosley and his Blackshirts.

Jimmy lives in a tenement with his newly widowed mother; Benny comes from a large Orthodox Jewish family. The discovery that Jimmy's mother's new friend Mr Searle is a Blackshirt places Jimmy in an agonizing dilemma. A vivid and compelling story that raises issues with many parallels today.

Alan Gibbons is the author of more than fifty books for older children and young adults. His many awards include the Blue Peter Book Award, Catalyst Award, Leicester Book Award, Stockport Book Award, Angus Book Award, Birmingham Chills Award, Salford KS4 Book of the Year, Salford Special Award, Hackney Short Novels Award. He has undertaken hundreds of school visits here and overseas.

His books include: Shadow of the Minotaur, The Edge, Caught in the Crossfire, the Booked Up choice The Dying Photo and the non-fiction picture book Darwin. He is the organiser of the Campaign for the Book.

Anita Klein paintings are collected worldwide. She divides her time between her studios in Tuscany and London. Though the Looking Glass is published to coincide with a solo show spread across two central London galleries, the Bankside Gallery and Menier Gallery. The book is a celebration of the artist’s ‘two lives’ and the different cultures she lives in, featuring over 80 full colour reproductions of the artist’s latest work.

Anita Klein studied at Chelsea and Slade Schools of Art. She has exhibited internationally and public collectors of her work include the British Museum and the Arts Council. Her work is warm, witty and instantly recognisable. Anita Klein lives in London. She was elected President of the Royal Society of Painter Printmakers in 2003. This is her third book for Five Leaves.

Nineteen Forty-eight is a comic verse-novel, audaciously rewriting George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four in Pushkin sonnets. Set during the 1948 London Olympics, it offers a radically alternative history of the Cold War, in which Britain has a Labour-Communist coalition government, the Royal Family have fled to Rhodesia and the US threatens to impose an economic blockade on Britain.

Featuring cartoons drawn especially for the book, Nineteen Forty-eight combines hard-boiled detective-novels and Pushkin sonnets, film-noir and Ealing comedy.

Andy Croft
Andy’s books include Red Letter Days, Out of the Old Earth, A Weapon in the Struggle, Selected Poems of Randall Swingler and Comrade Heart. He has written five novels and forty-two books for teenagers, mostly about football. He has edited many anthologies of poetry. His own collections include Ghost Writer, Sticky and Three Men on the Metro (with W.N. Herbert and Paul Summers). Nineteen Forty-eight is his second novel in Pushkin sonnets.

Martin Rowson
Martin is a multi award-winning cartoonist whose work appears regularly in The Guardian, The Independent on Sunday, The Daily Mirror, The Morning Star, Tribune and many other publications. His books include graphic adaptations of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy and a forthcoming updated version of Gulliver's Travels. Among his other books are The Limerickiad, The Dog Allusion, and Fuck and Stuff, a memoir of his late parents which was long-listed for the 2007 Samuel Johnson Prize.

Dominic Reeve's Smoke in the Lanes is a classic account of the old days of horse-drawn Romani wagons, but Travelling people embraced a new world of motors and trailers as the old ways became impossible. Forty years after Smoke in the Lanes Dominic Reeve returned to writing, describing without rose-tinted glasses the way his community struggled to preserve its culture, survive and, if possible, thrive.

"In this fascinating and valuable book, Dominic Reeve once more offers an insight into the world of Travellers." - Roma Virtual Network

Dominic Reeve is well past retirement age within the settled world, but continues to work, selling compost door to door. He wrote four books in the 1950s. Beneath the Blue Sky sold out in its first Five Leaves edition, and is now presented in a new edition. The author's early autobiography will shortly be published. His books can be read as social documents or simply as one Traveller's life during the last forty years.

Red Groove is a different kind of jazz book, filled with spirited and well-informed essays by a man who has listened to and loved the music passionately and critically for more than 50 years. Searle emphasises the musicians’ links with the real social and political world of which they are a vital cultural part, as well as demonstrating how jazz has become a world musical phenomenon with his writing on jazzmen and jazzwomen and their musicianship, from as far apart as Japan and Argentina, Chicago and Sheffield, Bengal and Benin and Iraq, Norway, Cuba and Cape Town.

"A delightfully detailed and imaginative evocation of innumerable moments of recorded and live magic. There’s rigorous scholarship here, yes, but essentially Red Groove is a dazzling celebration, motivated by a sense of respect, gratitude and love." - Robert Wyatt

Chris Searle is mostly known as an educator. He came to national fame when sacked for publishing his students' poetry – and was eventually reinstated by Margaret Thatcher, then Minister of Education! He has worked as a teacher in Canada, Tobago, Mozambique, Grenada and England.

His books include Lightning of your Eyes, Classrooms of Resistance, Words Unchained, This New Season, We're Building the New School, The World in a Classroom, Grenada Morning and The Forsaken Lover (for which he was awarded the Martin Luther King Prize) He is the jazz correspondent for the Morning Star and his other jazz book is Forward Groove (Northway).

From journeymen musicians to stars with many albums to their name, Mixed Messages includes interviews with 21 American jazz musicians – on music, mostly, but the world intrudes, as it does with the best of jazz music. The musicians range from the trombonist Louis Nelson, who was born in 1902, through the New Orleans pianist Ellis Marsalis, who is still playing and on to Byron Stripling, who plays trumpet with his Columbus Jazz Orchestra. Peter Vacher has been interviewing American jazz players since the 1950s and this is his second collection of interviews.

Mixed Messages is lavishly illustrated with rare and original photographs and will be of interest to any serious follower of jazz.

Peter Vacher knows everybody in the jazz world. His interviews
and articles have appeared throughout the English speaking
world, including in the Melody Maker, Jazz UK and CODA.
His previous book of interviews is Soloists and Sidemen
(Northway Press). He also writes obituaries of jazz musicians
for The Guardian.

Kate is a weaver, like her mother. When her mother is killed Kate is convinced it's her fault. Tiredness, grieving and guilt come together in a visit back in time to the mill, where Kate must learn to weave the dark thread in her life into the overall picture and make sense of her life.

A moving time slip story, alternating life in the 18th century and today. The setting is Cromford Mill in Derbyshire, which is still standing, part of the Derwent Mills World Heritage Site.

Pauline Chandler has published several books set in
different historical periods. These include Warrior Girl,
set in the France of Joan of Arc, Viking Girl and The Mark
of Edain, in which Aoife (Ee-fa) a Druid princess, kidnaps
a Roman war elephant. She lives in Derbyshire, the
setting for Dark Thread.

“He must have known he was going to die… he must have known how things would end.”

“He must have known he was going to die… he must have known how things would end.” DCI Ernie Bright is dead. A good cop gone bad? Not everyone believes that one of Tayside Constabulary’s longest serving detectives was leading a double life. One of those looking to vindicate the dead copper is Bright’s protégé, , the private investigator J McNee who has his own reasons for trying to prove Bright’s innocence. But as the evidence piles up and McNee makes enemies on both sides of the law, he finds that justice and the law are not always the same, and that good people can make bad decisions.

Dark, violent and psychologically gripping, the third in the critically acclaimed J McNee series will change the Dundee detective’s world forever.

The third book of the McNee series.

Russel D McLean's previous books are The Good Son and The Lost Sister, both of which ran to reprints and had good reviews on both sides of the Atlantic. Russel writes for the crime magazines The Big Thrill, Do Some Damage and Crime Scene Scotland. He works in Waterstone's in Dundee.

The second annual themed compendium of writing by Five Leaves’
authors and friends. The first, Maps, received positive reviews in
The Guardian and Time Out, and sold out twice in its first three months.


Paul Barker was the editor of New Society from 1968-86. In his series “the other Britain” he wrote about the utopian village of New Lanark.
Marie Louise Berneri’s essay was first published in Journey Through Utopia in 1950, one year after her untimely death. She had been joint editor of Freedom.
Will Buckingham’s latest book is Introducing Happiness: a practical guide (Icon Books). He also gives talks on the Moomins and Philosophy.
Jeff Cloves lives close to Whiteway, near Stroud, a famed anarchist colony. In 2011 he organised a festival celebrating the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca.
Gillian Darley is the author of Villages of Vision. Her other books include biographies of Sir John Soane and Octavia Hill. Her most recent book is Vesuvius.
Dennis Hardy writes about liveable cities, the subject of his current research. His books include Alternative Communities in Nineteenth Century England.
Pippa Hennessy attempts to live as we should live, and bring her family up likewise. It is not easy. Pippa works at Five Leaves and writes poetry and fiction.
Ian Clayton lives in Featherstone. A broadcaster, writer and storyteller, his memoir about music, Bringing It All Back Home, is an indie press best-seller.
Haywire Mac claimed to be the author of The Big Rock Candy Mountain, a hobo tune. Some think it “traditional”.
Mike Marquesee asks us not to fear utopian thinking. He is the author of books on cricket, Bob Dylan, Muhammad Ali and If I Am Not For Myself: journey of an anti-Zionist Jew.
John Lucas wonders if New Zealand is the nearest we’ll get to utopia. His books include the Dolmen Prize winner, 92 Achernon Street.
Karen Maitland first researched the mediaeval women’s communities, the Beguines, for her novel The Owl Killers.
William Morris needs no introduction…
Chris Moss visits Patagonia, home to many utopian experiments. He is the travel and books editor of Time Out.
Deirdre O’Byrne looks at Marge Piercy’s feminist utopia.
Deirdre teaches Irish and English literature at Loughborough University.
John Payne’s latest book is a Signal city guide to Bath. Here he writes about the debates during the English Civil War.
Mike Pentelow and Peter Arkill draw on their book A Pub Crawl through History to look at pubs and pub signs connected to utopian pioneers.
Peter Preston was very active, for many years, in the William Morris Society. His other big love was DH Lawrence.
Andy Rigby looks back on communes. His 1970s book Communes in Britain was well known in its day. He taught at Bradford University School of Peace Studies.
David Rosenberg writes about the Bund, the pre-War Jewish socialist organisation in Poland. He is the author of Battle for the East End: Jewish responses to fascism in the 1930s.
Leon Rosselson’s songs include this one on William Morris, and the Billy Bragg hit The World Turned Upside Down, also the title of his 4-CD boxed set from Fuse/PM.
J. David Simons lived on a kibbutz in the 70s and 80s. He is following The Credit Draper and The Liberation of Celia Kahn with a novel set in British Mandate Palestine.
Paul Summers’ latest poetry collection is union. He currently lives in Australia. When in his native North East he founded the magazines Billy Liar and Liar Republic.
Mandy Vere has been at News from Nowhere Bookshop since 1976 and imagines she will eventually be carried out.
Colin Ward was the major chronicler of the unofficial landscape. His books covered squatting, allotments, the water crisis, the plotlands of the South East, transport and anarchy.
Ken Worpole has written on Essex before, in 350 Miles – an Essex Journey. His other books are on the hospice movement, town planning, and graveyard art.

Student follows Alison from Merseyside on the day she gets her A level results to her university finals three years later, with one chapter per term. Alison fights off a sexual assault, loses her virginity, takes drugs, goes to gigs and parties, makes and breaks friendships, and has a near nervous breakdown. Her boyfriend kills himself. There's little about studying.

This is a raw, intense and truthful novel about late adolescence in an urban setting (contemporary Nottingham), with lyrical moments and a positive note at the end. It’s never exploitative or sensationalist.

David Belbin's adult Tindal Street Press Bone and Cane
topped the Amazon Kindle charts. His follow-up book, What
You Don't Know, was published in January 2012. His Five
Leaves' novel The Pretender has been translated into
several languages. David Belbin first made his name as a
gritty and worldly writer of books for young adults,
featuring issues such as race, loss of virginity,
homosexuality and bullying, within a strong and honest
narrative.

Colin Ward was the historian of unofficial uses of the
landscape. The ten essays in Talking Green cover
environmental pollution, urban life, allotments, the uses of
nature, land settlement, regionalism, squatting, smallholding,
the green personality and the shires of Southern
England. Together they provide discussion points for anyone
interested in taking green politics further than climate
change and recycling (important as these are). Colin Ward
connects green politics and lifestyle to everyday living and
working, always providing positive proposals for future
living.

Colin Ward was the historian of unofficial uses of the
landscape. The ten essays in Talking Green cover
environmental pollution, urban life, allotments, the uses of
nature, land settlement, regionalism, squatting, smallholding,
the green personality and the shires of Southern
England. Together they provide discussion points for anyone
interested in taking green politics further than climate
change and recycling (important as these are). Colin Ward
connects green politics and lifestyle to everyday living and
working, always providing positive proposals for future
living.

Introduced by Gennady Estraikh (New York University)

Features original illustrations by Marc Chagall.

The thirty years between the Russian Revolution and Stalin’s destruction of Yiddish culture produced some of the best 20th century writing in Yiddish. Brilliant avant-garde work challenged the best of European modernism during the 1920s. Later Yiddish writers tried to be creative in the middle of the twists and turns of Stalin’s rule. Little of this work has been translated into English, despite many of the writers having a huge international sale in the heyday of Yiddish literature. The Soviet writers include David Bergelson, Peretz Markish and Dovid Hofshteyn.

Joseph Sherman taught at the Oriental Institute, Oxford. He
has edited a number of books on Yiddish literature and wrote
regularly for the Times Literary Supplement and the Jewish
press in the USA and South Africa. He died when the book was
first close to publication and it will be launched at a meeting in
his memory.

The Tyneside writer Peter Mortimer is used to writing about difficult places. Against Foreign Office advice he wandered round Yemen. He set up a children's theatre group in a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon and, over one summer, walked the length of Britain with one dog and no money, dependent on the kindness of strangers to provide accommodation and food.

In this book, part memoir, part documentary and social commentary, he undertook a shorter journey, taking up residence in the same street he grew up in, on the Sherwood council estate in Nottingham. It was a journey of only 160 miles, but one which involved revisiting his previous Nottingham life, some fifty years back.

Often feeling like a ghost, or disembodied spirit, Peter Mortimer stalks the streets of his past, attempting to put it into the context of how he lives now, trying to make sense of the two times.His sojourn makes for an unpredictable, often comic, sometimes painful journey.

Themes of changing times, class and society are universal. Anyone who has returned to their childhood home, however briefly, will immediately identify with the feelings and contradictions so vividly portrayed.

Peter Mortimer is probably best-known for his book Broke
Through Britain, recording his walk through Britain with no
money and nowhere to stay. His has written other extreme
travel books including Camp Shatila (Five Leaves) and Cool for
Qat (Mainstream). He lives in the North East, where he runs
Cloud Nine theatre company and Iron Press.

A body is discovered: the terrible mutilations spell out the wounds of the Stigmata. For Glasgow DI Ray McBain, the killings are strangely familiar... and then the dreams begin.

The first in a series of books featuring DI Ray McBain, a Glasgow detective who has too many friends in the underworld for his own good, but enough to support him when he has to go on the run, the main suspect in a murder case.

Michael J Malone is already known in Scotland as a poet,
including for a residency in a sex shop. He works as a financial
advisor in Ayr. This is the first book of a planned series by an
author who has already worked the territory in preparation for
his first book. We expect a lot of attention and readings.