All three speakers move from national to local issues in this event discussing public space and the built environment.

Travis Elborough will be talking about parks, one of his recent books being A Walk in the Park: The Life and Times of a People’s Institution - places that have been fought over by land-grabbing monarchs, hippies and the common people trying to savour a democratic space for relaxation.

Ian Waites will be talking about social housing his most recent book is Middlefield: A Postwar Council Estate in Time

Gillian Darley has written about utopian communities in Villages of Vision, but here she will be talking about Essex, which is the most interesting of counties.

Tickets: £10 (on the day), £8 (early booking), £5 (students/concessions)

Please buy your ticket in advance from Five Leaves Bookshop, 0115 8373097

Mechanics Institute, North Sherwood Street, Nottingham NG14EZ

In association with the  East Midlands Twentieth Century Society

Tonight we launch a limited edition collection of short stories by John Harvey, published by Five Leaves. Yes, there are some Resnick stories, yes there are some Frank Elder stories, yes there is a jazz element. And a fedora.

John Harvey is one of this country’s leading crime writers, many of his books being set in Nottingham including Darkness, Darkness which became a play at Nottingham Playhouse.

Free, refreshments provided

Booking essential on fiveleaves.bookshopevents@gmail.com

The British Isles are an archipelago made up of two large islands and 6,289 smaller ones. Some, like the Isle of Man, resemble miniature nations, with their own language and tax laws; others, like Ray Island in Essex, are abandoned and mysterious places. There are resurgent islands such as Eigg, which have been liberated from capricious owners to be run by their residents; holy islands like Bardsey, the resting place of 20,000 saints; and deserted islands such as St Kilda, famed for the evacuation of its human population, and now dominated by wild sheep and seabirds. Guardian writer Patrick Barkham explores some of the most beautiful landscapes in the British Isles as he travels to ever-smaller islands – places of freedom and imprisonment, party destinations and oases of peace, strangely suburban and deeply wild.

Tickets: £6 (£4 concessions)

Booking essential on fiveleaves.bookshopevents@gmail.com

Free, booking essential through Eventbrite via this link

Note the earlier-than-normal time

Room A48, Clive Granger Building, University of Nottingham

Gender injustice is the greatest human rights abuse on the planet, says Shami Chakrabarti in her new book Of Women. She outlines what needs fixing and makes proposals about what to do next, putting gender justice and the centre of the progressive political agenda.

Shami will be in conversation with Rachel Holmes, author of Eleanor Marx.

Shami Chakrabarti is Labour’s Shadow Attorney General and former Director of Liberty, the National Council for Civil Liberties.

Advance booking essential.

Book via fiveleaves.bookshopevents@gmail.com or in the shop.

Iain Sinclair makes a return visit to Five Leaves (though at Nottingham Mechanics!). Iain has been documenting the peculiar magic of the river-city that absorbs and obsesses him for most of his adult life. In The Last London, he strikes out on a series of solitary walks and collaborative expeditions to make a final reckoning with a capital stretched beyond recognition. Here is a mesmerising record of secret scholars and whispering ghosts. Of disturbing encounters. Night hospitals. Pits that become cameras. Mole Man labyrinths. And privileged swimming pools, up in clouds, patrolled by surveillance helicopters. Where now are the myths, the ultimate fictions of a many times revised city?

Travelling from the pinnacle of the Shard to the outer limits of the London Overground system at Croydon and Barking, from the Thames Estuary to the future ruins of Olympicopolis, Sinclair reflects on where London begins and where it ends. A memoir, a critique, a love letter, The Last London is a delirious conclusion to a truly epic project.

Local writer Jon McGregor’s latest novel is set in Derbyshire and follows the life of a small village, year by year after the disappearance of a visiting teenager.

We’ll discuss the book for the first 45 minutes and then Jon will join us to continue the discussion. This isn’t a reading or performance by Jon, but a book group discussion without and with him!

 

Ewan McLennan is a troubadour, balladeer and storyteller cut in the old style, but one of the best guitarists of his generation. His songs are passionate and burning with a desire for social justice. He recently toured with George Monbiot on Breaking the Spell of Loneliness. Tonight he will be singing old and new songs, self-written and traditional.

‘A gorgeous, lilting voice. So moving.’ Mojo Magazine

www.ewanmclennan.co.uk and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqCt_RuHupg

Yes, he’s Scottish, and yes this is St Andrew’s Day!

Entry: £10/£8

Advance purchase essential over the counter or via 0115 8373097

Richard H. King is professor emeritus of US intellectual history at the University of Nottingham, UK. He is the editor of Obama and Race: History, Culture, Politics, coeditor of Hannah Arendt and the Uses of History: Imperialism, Race, Nation, Genocide, and the author of Race, Culture and the Intellectuals, 1940-1970 and Arendt in America.

Richard was born and brought up in the Deep South and was active in the Civil Rights Movement.

Tickets: £3, including refreshment

Please let us know you are coming on fiveleaves.bookshopevents@gmail.com

Moira is a pagan author living locally. Her debut novel being launched at the UK’s largest pagan event, Witchfest. Wild Women is going to be one of the first books of its kind, featuring realistic pagan and wiccan practice as three generations of women in an ordinary family overcome their daily struggles with a quiet, gentle magic. She will also be talking about her new non-fiction book Witch’s Journey, which is a guide to foundation witchcraft religion in theory and practice.

Moira is a regular contributor to Witchcraft & Wicca magazine She appears at at pagan festivals throughout the year.

Tickets: £3.00, including refreshments

Booking essential on fiveleaves.bookshopevents@gmail.com

Readings from the Nottingham Peacebuilders anthology, together with music from around the world.

Tickets – donation on the night to Medecine Sans Frontieres. Refreshments available.

Please let us know you are coming on fiveleaves.bookshopevents@gmail.com

If the word flâneur conjures up visions of Baudelaire, boulevards and bohemia – then what exactly is a flâneuse?

Lauren Elkin defines her as ‘a determined resourceful woman keenly attuned to the creative potential of the city, and the liberating possibilities of a good walk’. Part cultural meander, part memoir, Flâneuse traces the relationship between the city and creativity through a journey that begins in New York and moves to Paris, via Venice, Tokyo and London, exploring the paths taken by the flâneuses who have lived and walked in those cities.

From nineteenth-century novelist George Sand to artist Sophie Calle, from war correspondent Martha Gellhorn to film-maker Agnes Varda, Lauren considers what is at stake when a certain kind of light-footed woman encounters the city and changes her life, one step at a time.

Tickets: £3.00, including refreshments

Please reserve your place via fiveleaves.bookshopevents@gmail.com