These Seven is available in Nottingham from Five Leaves Bookshop, Waterstones, Bromley House Library and at The Bookcase in Lowdham.

Mail order copies are available post-free in the UK from Five Leaves by credit card payment on 0115 8373097 (10–5.30 Monday-Saturday, 12–4 Sunday) or by PayPal to bookshop@fiveleaves.co.uk or by cheque to Five Leaves, 14a Long Row, Nottingham NG1 2DH

International orders are available post free from www.bookdepository.com/These-Seven/9781910170205

These Seven Nottingham writers cover a lot of ground. John Harvey visits his traditional world of crime with a story more domestic than usual, Megan Taylor spends time in Old Market Square waiting for someone whose arrival might change her life, graphic novelist Brick imagines a Nottingham version of Simeon the Stylite living at the top of the Aspire sculpture, Paula Rawsthorne finds that being a child of a refugee brings its own problems, and Alison Moore realises that a weekend away is not always idyllic. Meantime Shreya Sen Handley's Indian family discovers something going on at the bottom of their garden, and Alan Sillitoe is back on the streets of Nottingham, where this all began.

London Fictions is a book about London, real and imagined. Two dozen contemporary writers, from Cathi Unsworth to Courttia Newland, reflect on some of the novelists and the novels that have helped define the modern city, from George Gissing to Zadie Smith, Hangover Square to Brick Lane.

It is a book about East End boys and West End girls, bed-sit land and dockland, the homeless and the homesick, immigrants and emigrants. All human life is here – high-minded Hampstead and boozy Fitzrovia, the Jewish East End, intellectual Bloomsbury and Chinese Limehouse, Black London, Asian London, Irish London, Gay London...

Andrew Whitehead on The Nether World by George Gissing
Andrew Lane on The Sign of Four by Arthur Conan Doyle
Nadia Valman on Children of the Ghetto by Israel Zangwill
Angela V. John on Neighbours of Ours by Henry W. Nevinson
Sarah Wise on A Child of the Jago by Arthur Morrison
Anne Witchard on Limehouse Nights by Thomas Burke
Heather Reyes on Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
Zoë Fairbairns on This Bed Thy Centre by Pamela Hansford Johnson
Rachel Lichtenstein on Jew Boy by Simon Blumenfeld
John King on May Day by John Sommerfield
John Lucas on Hangover Square by Patrick Hamilton
Susan Alice Fischer on Farewell Leicester Squareby Betty Miller
Jane Miller on The Heat of the Day by Elizabeth Bowen
Andy Croft on Rising Tide by Jack Lindsay
Bill Schwarz on The Lonely Londoners by Sam Selvon
Jerry White on Absolute Beginners by Colin MacInnes
Cathi Unsworth on The L-Shaped Roomby Lynne Reid Banks
Ken Worpole on The Lowlife by Alexander Baron
Susie Thomas on The Buddha of Suburbiaby Hanif Kureishi
Gregory Woods on Ready to Catch Him Should He Fallby Neil Bartlett
Lisa Gee on White Teeth by Zadie Smith
Valentine Cunningham on The Hard Shoulderby Chris Petit
Courttia Newland on Dead Air by Iain Banks
Sanchita Islam on Brick Lane by Monica Ali
Jon Day on Capital by John Lanchester
Philippa Thomas on NW by Zadie Smith

Andrew Whitehead is the editor of BBC World Service News and an editor of History Workshop Journal. He is the author of A Mission in Kashmir and runs the website www.londonfictions.com

Jerry White teaches London History at Birkbeck, University of London. His books include London in the Twentieth Century: A City and Its People, which won the Wolfson History Prize in 2002.

"It's not the patients you should worry about. It's the staff you should watch out for. "

Ship of Fools comprises twenty short stories, one for each year the author worked in the mental health system. These stories are fiction, but they are based on the real world of psychiatry and maximum security institutions. Written from the point of view of a staff member, the author lifts the lid on psychiatry, that secret domain. There are vivid accounts of life and death, of betrayal and redemption.

"They had drawn low cards in the lottery of life to get mental illness in the first place and then they had us to deal with on top of that."

Rod Madocks is a full time writer who spent twenty years working as a mental health professional, including time in maximum security forensic institutions. He is the author of No Way To Say Goodbye, which was shortlisted for the CWA/ITV Crime Thriller Awards in 2009. He has a PhD on the work of Vladimir Nabokov and lives in Nottingham.

Jimmy Wilson is an East End boy whose father tends a barrow on Brick Lane. As an eleven year old, and twelve years later after the war, he is infatuated with Pinkie, a mixed-race girl whose mother lives among "the Indians" then starting to move into the East End. This is London's East End in the 1940s – polyglot, violent, poor. The novel takes place in run-down houses, down the local, during the Blitz and at an all day wedding feast. What will happen to Jimmy? What will happen to Pinkie in these changing times?

Robert Poole was born in Stepney. He was in the Navy in WWII and later the Merchant Navy. He jumped ship in New Zealand, changed his name and became a radio broadcaster. Eventually the police caught up with him and he was deported back to Britain where he ran a bingo stall. London E1 was his only published book. He died in 1963, two years after the book's publication.

Rachel Lichtenstein's books on the East End include On Brick Lane and, with Iain Sinclair, Rodinsky's Room.

The Open Door follows Saturday Night and Sunday Morning as the final volume in the Seaton series. Returning on a troopship from Malaya in 1949, Brian Seaton (Arthur's brother) comes back to a Nottingham world of rationing, the black market, a wife he no longer loves and a child who does not recognise him.

He is full of life and lust, but he has tuberculosis, forcing a long stay in a military hospital where he falls for first one nurse, then a second, while carrying on a relationship with another TB sufferer back in Nottingham.

In the background, this partially autobiographical novel reveals that Seaton is starting to write, meeting others like him as he realises there is a wider world than the back streets of his Midlands home.

Alan Sillitoe came to fame in 1958 with Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. His next book was The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. Both were filmed and remain in print. After a long career as a novelist, playwright, poet and screen writer he died in 2010. Ruth Fainlight is a long established poet and translator, her Collected Poems came out in 2011.

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.

This Bed Thy Centre was Johnson's first novel. First published in 1935, it was reprinted several times in that year and was reprinted in various editions into the 1960s.

The book is set in South London. Its publication caused a scandal because of its exploration of sex and religion. The novel addressed issues of first love, burgeoning sexuality and painful early marriage. The book includes many unforgettable characters including the rowdy, immoral and doomed Mrs Maginnis who dies as sportingly as she lived, a religious tubthumper, and a pair of star-crossed lovers whose difficult relationship spanned the class divide.

Pamela Hansford Johnson wrote 27 novels, the last in 1981, the year of her death. Her novels were regularly chosen by the Book Society. The title of the book was suggested by her close friend Dylan Thomas. Talk of marriage was abandoned and she later married CP Snow, becoming a distinguished critic and playwright as well as a widely-read novelist.

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.

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.

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

Aazim is fifteen. His family is about to be deported. When Immigration come for them, he decides to hide in a city allotment. But nowhere is safe for long. Aazim meets Nadimah. People are after her, too. Soon, the pair have to go on the run and they have to find work. Their new country is full of secret gardens. Few of them are safe places. Will they find a way to stay?

David Belbin is the author of more than forty books for young adults, those for reluctant readers include China Girl and Stray. His other titles include Denial, Festival and, from Five Leaves, Love Lessons and Dead Teachers Don't Talk. He has written a series of crime fiction books for Tindall Street Press, and an adult novel, The Pretender, for Five Leaves. He runs the Creative Writing MA programme at Nottingham Trent University.

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.

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.

The appearance of Zoë Wicomb’s first set of short stories, You Can’t
Get Lost in Capetown, precipitated the founding of a fan club that has
come to include Toni Morrison, J.M. Coetzee, Bharati Mukherjee,
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and the New York Times, the London
Times, the Wall Street Journal, TLS and the New Yorker. The One That
Got Away straddles dual worlds. An array of characters inhabits a
complexly interconnected, twenty-first century universe. The author
explore a range of human relationships: marriage, friendship, family
ties, and relations with those who serve us. Wicomb’s fluid, shifting
technique questions conventional certainties and makes for
exhilarating reading, full of ironic twists, ambiguities, and moments
of startling insight.

"An extraordinary writer...seductive, brilliant, and precious, her talent glitters" - Toni Morrison

Zoë Wicomb was born in South Africa and now lives in Glasgow.
She is currently a professor in the department of English studies
at Strathclyde University and Visiting Professor at Stellenbosch
University, South Africa. In addition to two collections of short
stories, she has published two novels, David’s Story and Playing in
the Light. She has recently been one of the judges on the IMPAC
literary award.

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

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.

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.

1911, East London. The police collaborate with racketeers to keep an uneasy peace, periodically broken by vicious street wars. Dido Peach comes to prominence running protection rackets by breaking the unwritten rules of the underworld. His fall is just as spectacular, shaking even the callous and vicious world he lived in.

"Enthralling" - Sunday Times

"Alexander Baron was a skilled traditionalist, a contriver of plotdriven, socially perceptive meditations on place." - Iain Sinclair

Alexander Baron is a major writer of the past. His From the City, From the Plough was a classic of writing about WWII. The re-issue of his The Lowlife is currently on hold pending a film deal, the last publication of which was introduced by Iain Sinclair, long a champion of Alexander Baron’s work.

A rare translation from a forgotten language and culture

Ladino is a Romantic language derived from Old Spanish. As a Jewish language, it is influenced heavily by Hebrew and Aramaic, and other languages where Sephardic expellees settled around the world, primarily throughout the Ottoman Empire. The Ladino novel was a new form of literature for the Ladino-speaking populations of the Balkans, Greece, Turkey and Palestine, which appeared towards the end of the 19th century and died out towards 1930 as its reading public declined.

Elia Karmona’s La Mujer Onesta (The Chaste or Faithful Wife), published in Constantinople in 1925 is one of roughly a dozen Ladino novels in the British Library’s collection. La Mujer Onesta is superior in literary worth to the average Ladino novel, many of which were translations and adaptations of foreign romantic works.

A bilingual edition in Ladino and English. There is a renewed interest in Ladino with its music and history being performed and studied.

Ladino literature has rarely been republished in accessible editions, originals being difficult to find and existing in archives

Elia Karmona was a typographer, journalist and editor of the comic paper El Djugueton (Constantinople). He wrote around 60 novelettes and novels, published in Cairo, Jerusalem and Constantinople. Michael Alpert is the author of Secret Judaism and the Spanish Inquisition, also published by Five Leaves. Price: £14.99.

New fiction by Ali Smith, Jon McGregor, Tamar Yellin, Richard Zimler, Amy Bloom, Nicole Krauss, Karen Maitland, Etgar Keret, Eshkol Nevo, Michelene Wandor, Tania Hershman, Jonathan Wilson, Zvi Jagendorf, Shaun Levin, Ellen Galford.

Stories of betrayal and fear, desire and satisfaction, love, grief and revenge.

“And so I read these stories certain that I would find connections between them and there are plenty. Whispers and shadows abound. The dark menace lurking in the best fairy tales is never far from the surface in most of these stories, too. All the contributors, whatever differences in age, gender or geographical location, are trying to make sense of the brutal century from which we have emerged and the uncertain one into which we are still tentatively trespassing, not ready to claim ownership. Some seem to have sought connections to dead relatives who live on in memory or genetic inheritance.” - From the introduction by Anne Sebba, author of Jennie Churchill: Winston’s American Mother.

"The dark menace lurking in the best fairy tales is never far from the surface in most of these stories." - Anne Sebba

Anne Joseph is a freelance feature writer and editor. She previously worked for several years as submissions editor for Haus Publishing. Her book, From the Edge of the World (2003, Vallentine Mitchell), is a collection of letters and stories written by Jewish refugees. The Sea of Azov was the birthplace of Chekhov – the master of the short story

…He was a doctor for God’s sake. I was told to strip and they tossed my clothes away saying, ‘You won’t need these here either,’ and I was handed a blue boiler suit to wear. I began to protest but got a slam in the mouth and lost my front teeth. They then pushed me into the pool, to disinfect me, they said. And that was my start in the hospital. I was there eighteen years. They took everything away.
Patient R. Recounted to the author 1997.

Dr Jack Shade’s long time girlfriend vanishes, presumed dead. Through his professional contacts Shade moves to work within the secure hospital system – to try to understand, and take revenge on those who might be responsible.

During his time in the hospital he realises he is as much a prisoner as those he works with.

Shade observes, gets involved with, hurts but ultimately comes to understand his clients. Meantime his own dissolute life of drugs and affairs takes its toll.

Like WG Sebald, the author includes photos to help tell the story - are they real or is this all fiction?

Rod Madocks has spent ten years writing this unforgettable novel, drawing on his experience of secure units. He is a policy officer in Mental Health Commissioning in Nottinghamshire.

Mark Trace shows a remarkable talent for literary forgery. A gap year in Paris sees his skill exploited by a manuscript dealer. Mark fetches up in London, working at one of the UK's oldest literary magazines. That's when the trouble really starts. Hemingway and Graham Greene are only the beginning. What starts as a prank soon becomes deadly serious. In this literary thriller David Belbin writes about originality, desire and literary ambition, in the voice of a character with the capacity to deceive everyone, including himself.

David Belbin is the author of more than thirty novels for young adults, including Denial and Festival. His short stories for adults have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies. He runs the MA in Creative Writing at Nottingham Trent University. He currently edits the Crime Express series for Five Leaves.

Sharp, bittersweet tales of middle-aged American men, in hot water with their women, with their sweet or streetwise kids, with their own consciences.

This is about the American husband and father: well meaning but caught out, horny but going to seed, adrift on dreams and fancies and looking for a break. Men in trouble.


"Entertaining… Taut and funny" - The Boston Globe

"Sublime… it might be considered a companion volume to the movie 'Sideways'" - Seattle Weekly

"Tantalising… his writing engages on every page with disarming intelligence and imagination." - Elle

Jonathan Wilson is the author of the biography 'Marc Chagal'l, two novels, 'A Palestine Affair' and 'The Hiding Room', two collections of stories, 'Schoom' and 'An Ambulance is on the Way: Stories of Men in Trouble', and two critical studies of the fiction of Saul Bellow. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, and Best American Short Stories, among other publications, and he is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship.

He is a professor of English at Tufts University and lives with his family in Newton, Massachusetts.

The Hiding Room moves between Cairo and British Mandate Palestine in 1941, and Israel of 1991. In 1941 a reserved English officer falls for a waiflike Viennese Jew trying to flee to Palestine. He betrays her, then tries to save her from the consequences of his action. He too has to flee, at risk both from his fellow British soldiers and the Zionist underground. 50 years on, at the height of the Intifada, the son of this brief partnership comes to Israel and Palestine to trace what happened to his father.

The Hiding Room is a tense historical thriller. Published in the USA by Penguin, this is the first UK paperback publication of The Hiding Room.

"...this story of love, betrayal and redemption is a significant achievement" - Publishers Weekly (USA)

Jonathan Wilson is the author of the biography 'Marc Chagal'l, two novels, 'A Palestine Affair' and 'The Hiding Room', two collections of stories, 'Schoom' and 'An Ambulance is on the Way: Stories of Men in Trouble', and two critical studies of the fiction of Saul Bellow. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, and Best American Short Stories, among other publications, and he is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship.

He is a professor of English at Tufts University and lives with his family in Newton, Massachusetts.

It is summer... a heat wave... tense uneasy days in the city. A classic of women's and dystopian writing

"A successful and upsetting novel" - Sunday Times

"Intelligent and energetic book... (which) works persuasively" - Observer

Crime short stories by Catherine Arnold, David Belbin, Robert Cordell. Michael Eaton, Raymond Flynn, John Harvey, HRF Keating, Robert McMinn, Stanlet Middleton, Peter Mortimer, Brendan Murphy, Julie Myerson, Frank Palmer, Alan Sillitoe and Keith Wright - all from the crime-writing city of Nottingham.

"...there's a lot more than simple villainy in this thoroughly varied but uniformly atmospheric collection" - Mail on Sunday

"...sure to be a collector's item" - Crime Time

Also by David Belbin: Dead Guilty, Dead Teachers Don't Talk

Michelene Wandor’s new collection of short stories ranges from Biblical to modern, from Renaissance Italy to present day Israel, and from the power of music to its dangers. Her poetic and dramatic skills infuse her stories with vivid voices and haunting characters. Henry VIII and Isabella d’Este enjoy a clandestine encounter; a modern retelling of the Book of Esther liberates the voice of Queen Vashti; today’s musicians encounter the old myths of Orpheus; and the dilemmas of being Jewish are poignantly traced through the European diaspora into the cross-cultural crises of the Middle East.

Michelene Wandor is a poet, playwright, musician and critic, as well as a prolific writer of short stories. Her dramatisation of Eugene Sue’s The Wandering Jew was staged at the National Theatre. She won an International Emmy for her adaptation of The Belle of Amherst for Thames TV. She teaches creative writing at London Metropolitan University. Her selected poems, Gardens of Eden Revisited, are published by Five Leaves.


Five Leaves Short Stories by Women.

Zoë Fairbairns’ stories, set mainly in London and its more-or-less fashionable suburbs, occupy the spaces between words and actions, beliefs and realities. A 40-year-old woman who has never had children and never wanted to, revisits her decision; a little girl wonders why she attends a school run by a religion that neither she nor her parents belong to; 50-something lefties discover things that they might have preferred not to know about their pensions; a woman goes to meet her partner’s new love, and tries to be friendly. The collection also includes an autobiographical piece reviewing the author’s membership of a 1970s women’s writing group.


Zoë Fairbairns’ novels include Benefits (a feminist classic, re-published by Five Leaves), Closing, Here Today, Stand We At Last, Other Names and Daddy’s Girls. Her short stories have appeared in many anthologies and have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4. She lives in London and works for a TV facilities company, subtitling programmes for deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers.


Five Leaves Short Stories by Women

Magnolia Street was an instant success on its first publication in 1932, running to many editions. Available again for a new generation.

Magnolia Street is a novel on a grand scale, reminiscent of Arnold Bennett in its invocation of place and time.

The book describes “the crowded years” between 1910 and 1930, and the difficult relations between immigrant Jews and their English neighbours.

Themes of conflict and assimilation facing migrant and host are still current.

Louis Golding was one of Britain’s best selling writers in the 30s and 40s and was popular into the 1950s. He wrote over 40 books of fiction and non-fiction, including on boxing, haute cuisine and politics.

Magnolia Street became a play and was later made into a TV film.

Introduced by Hugh Cecil, author of Imperial Marriage, Clever Hearts and several other biographies and works on WW1.

In British-occupied Palestine after World War 1, a beleaguered London painter and his American wife witness the murder of an Orthodox Jew. She is drawn into an affair with the British investigating officer, while he seeks solace in painting. Each had come to Palestine to escape grief, and had to confront the political and person issues they had left behind.

Reviews of the American edition:

"Wilson is a talented writer with a gift for story, scene and character." - The Boston Globe

"A Palestine Affair is hard to put down. .. (it) echoes its modernist predecessors: Foster’s A Passage to India, Conrad's The Secret Agent..." - San Francisco Chronicle

"A story that tautens the sinuous strands of (the) period into a lethal knot." - New York Times Book Review

"Worth reading? You bet it is!" - Saul Bellow

" A swift little mystery-romance… Crisply written… Wonderfully rich in period detail and atmosphere…" - Seattle Weekly

Jonathan Wilson was born in London but has lived in the USA since 1976. His previous two books, Schoom and The Hiding Room were published by Secker and Penguin.

Jonathan Wilson writes regularly for the New Yorker and the New York Times Book Review. He has a Guggenheim Fellowship.

A Palestine Affair was published in the USA by Pantheon/Anchor, a division of Random House.

There I discovered the mirror. It was sitting on top of a dusty seventeenth century Portugese dresser in the twisted-and-turned style made popular following Vasco da Gama's first trip to India and it caught my attention because it was shaped like a lyre...

From the haunting title story by Richard Zimler onwards, this book reflects the diversity of modern Jewish life and the self-confidence of Jewish writing. The contributors include Carol Bergman, Tony Dinner, Moris Farhi, Rachel Castell Farhi, Elaine Feinstein, Ellen Galford, Jack Gratus, Dan Jacobson, Zvi Jaggendorf, Gabriel Josipovici, Robert Lasson, Shaun Levin, Deena Linett, Marci Lopez-Levi, Carole Malkin, Rozanne Rabinowitz, Nessa Rapoport, Frederic Raphael, Stephen Walker, Michelene Wandor, Shelley Weiner, Jonathan Wilson, Tamar Yellin and Richard Zimler.

Published in association with the European Jewish Publication Society.

"The co-editors are to be congratulated on putting together a diverse and interesting collection" - Babel Guide to Jewish Fiction

"I found the sheer diversity of this collection both impressive and also reassuring because it certainly suggests that there need be nothing particularly confining about identifying oneself as a Jewish writer"
- Edinburgh Star

Sunday Night and Monday Morning features new short stories by 16 writers born or living in Nottinghamshire. All contributors are published by mainstream publishers and have national reputations. Most of the stories were written specially for this book. Settings range from the American Deep South to Lithuania, inner city Nottingham to medieval battlefields.

Contributors:

David Belbin – author of Love Lessons
Stephen Booth – author of The Dead Place
Clare Brown – author of The Creation Myths
Elizabeth Chadwick – author of Shadows and Strongholds
Stephan Collishaw – author of Amber
Tom Cox – author of Educating Peter
Matt Haig – author of The Last Family in England
Robert Harris – author of Fatherland
John Harvey – author of Ash and Bone
Clare Littleford – author of Death Duty
Jon McGregor – author of If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things
Eve Makis – author of Eat, Drink and Be Married
Julie Myerson – author of Home
Kat Pomfret – author of Paradise Jazz
and introducing Nicola Monaghan whose first novel appears from Chatto & Windus in 2006

"This play on words from arguably Nottingham's most famous recent contributor to literature heralds a collection of short stories to mark the tenth anniversary of Five Leaves Press, a small independent Nottingham publishing house. The 16 stories collected here make you realise what a wealth of talented writers either live or were born in the County... this is an exciting and diverse collection with something for everyone." - Nottingham Evening Post

James Urquhart reviews fiction for the Daily Telegraph, the Independent and the Financial Times.

In the end she was forced to take her chances on the open ocean and there, off the coast of Scotland, she drowned him because she thought he deserved it. He probably did.

"...a dreamy novel, pulled along by a thread of emotion."
- Los Angeles Times

Victoria Nelson’s stories, set in her native California, and New Zealand, link vivid natural settings with characters caught up in events not of their making. A San Francisco poet is kidnapped by the Russian Mafia; an American visiting a provincial New Zealand town is gradually caught up in her host’s immersion in Maori culture; a hapless stockbroker is pursued by a woman living in an abandoned school bus; a Halloween party on a Sausalito houseboat takes on an unexpected dimension.

Victoria Nelson’s stories, set in her native California, and New Zealand, link vivid natural settings with characters caught up in events not of their making. A San Francisco poet is kidnapped by the Russian Mafia; an American visiting a provincial New Zealand town is gradually caught up in her host’s immersion in Maori culture; a hapless stockbroker is pursued by a woman living in an abandoned school bus; a Halloween party on a Sausalito houseboat takes on an unexpected dimension.


Five Leaves Short Stories by Women

A Year of Two Summers comprises a – roughly chronological – series of short stories starting with adolescent sex in South Africa, to suppressed emotions in South Africa, to gay life in London.

This collection introduces an array of interesting characters: a young man experimenting with cross-dressing, a new recruit in the Israeli army fantasising about a fellow soldier and trying to live as fully human during the invasion of Lebanon, a South African woman and her Syrian boyfriend tiptoeing around each other in their London flat – unsure how to relate to each other after the birth of their child.

"Like (the German writer WG) Sebald, Levin pays meticulous attention to small, everyday details - smells, tastes, body definitions, even the design of shoes - and uses them as hooks upon which to hang troubled, fractured memories. These deceptively simple, poetic stories invite any number of readings under post-colonial, gay, Jewish theories of literature. By turns enlightening and frustrating, Levin amplifies big themes by way of personal, tiny moments." - GCN

"Shaun Levin’s prose is so taut, his images so vivid, that it feels as if he’s talking right to you, and even shouting sometimes. This is a collection where, at last, sex is given its rightful place as both a celebration and a comfort. Many of the stories benefit from the writer’s own journeying as a gay man through South Africa, Israel, America and the UK, although Levin manages to write equally convincingly about that disjointed time when a nursing mother wonders who her body belongs to. For all their themes of dislocation, conflict, identity, home in all its meanings, at the heart of these stories (like those of Chekhov, a writer Levin plays tribute to) is the one thing that matters. Love." - Pulp Net

Praise for Shaun Levin’s previous novella Seven Sweet Things:

"In every chapter there is a moment to take your breath away with its simplicity, its originality, its honesty" - Time Out

"... a rewarding and thoughtful read as well as one of admirable craftsmanship and delicacy." - Lamda Book Review

Shaun Levin's gay and Jewish stories have appeared in magazines in Britain and America, and, in Hebrew, in Israel, including: Modern South African Stories; Gay Times Book of Short Stories and The Slow Mirror: new fiction by Jewish Writers. He is the recipient of an Arts Council Writers Award and editor of the gay and lesbian literary journal Chroma. He is a South African writer, now living in London. He has taught creative writing and is a playwright.