Cinema Love by Jiaming Tang

January 16, 2025 10:36 am No Comments

Cinema Love is the impressive debut novel by Chinese American writer Jiaming
Tang. The book’s blurb and the opening chapters may lead readers to believe that it
primarily explores the lives of gay men in post-Mao China, a period when
homosexuality was still a criminal offence. That portrayal includes the imagination of
a nondescript cinema functioning as a queer utopia and a Stonewall-type riot in
which gay men courageously resist the police—both of which lack historical
accuracy. However, as the narrative transitions to 1980s Chinatown and
contemporary, post-pandemic New York, the novel’s true strength emerges: a
poignant story of migrant lives, women’s agency, and the reconciliation of traumatic
pasts.

The tentative, fearful gay characters eventually give way to resilient female
characters who dare to love and hate with intensity. The book becomes most
relatable and evocative when read as a chronicle of the migratory experiences of an
older generation of (often undocumented) migrants from China to the United States.
These individuals carry buried but unforgotten traumas, endure shattered ‘American
dreams’, and yet persist in valiantly holding on to their aspirations, hopes, and
desires. The novel stands as a love song to Chinatown and the Chinese diaspora
community that the author knows intimately.

The introduction of ghostly elements might initially seem disorienting in a narrative
grounded primarily in social realism. Nevertheless, readers are encouraged to
embrace the supernatural—ghosts, destiny, and other ethereal forces—to make
sense of the novel’s many twists, turns, and coincidences. Accepting these elements
opens the door to intriguing insights into the mundane, everyday dimensions of
religion and spirituality in Asia, as experienced by some.

The title, Cinema Love, primarily references gay men’s affection for one another
within the Workers’ Cinema, where mainstream war films created an ideal backdrop
for clandestine cruising in the shadows. Tang’s writing is strikingly cinematic, deftly
cutting between scenes, characters, and perspectives—from intimate close-ups of
individual lives to expansive long shots capturing the social panorama and
communal mobilisation. At times, the story risks lapsing into melodrama,
sentimentality, or even kitsch. However, written in an era when diasporic Chinese
communities in the United States and worldwide are grappling with the historical and
contemporary traumas of homophobia, xenophobia, migration controls, and anti-
Asian racism, this gut-punching melodrama serves as a potent and necessary salve
for its characters and readers alike.

The sophistication of the novel’s narrative structure and character development
belies the fact that this is Tang’s debut work. Cinema Love is a substantial contribution to Asian American literature and provides a strong foundation for an inevitable feature film adaptation.

Source: Bao, Hongwei. “Gut-punching Melodrama: Jiaming Tang’s Cinema Love.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 9 Jan. 2025, chajournal.blog/2025/01/09/cinema-love.

Hongwei Bao

Cinema Love is available from fiveleavesbookshop.co.uk/product/cinema-love-not-just-an-extraordinary-debut-but-a-future-classic-jessamine-chan/.

The novel is also published in paperback at the end of January 2025

Five Leaves Favourite Books of 2024

January 11, 2025 3:18 pm No Comments

Staff Picks December 2024

December 5, 2024 10:43 am No Comments

(more…)

Jonathan Taylor, A Physical Education: On Bullying, Discipline and Other Lessons. (Goldsmiths Press, £23.00)

October 19, 2024 11:06 am No Comments

Jonathan Taylor is an author, editor, lecturer and critic who lives in Leicestershire. In the first chapter of A Physical Education, Taylor writes, ‘I want to explore the hall of mirrors that is criticism and autobiography … I want to explore the uses and abuses of educational power from a subjective, rather than pseudo-objective, perspective.’
He achieves those aims with clarity and grace. In a book that wears its evident scholarship lightly, Taylor reflects on his own experience in educational institutions, referencing literary criticism, philosophy and sociology.

Having been a victim of workplace bullying myself (the workplace in question was a large primary school where I was deputy-head) perhaps I was looking for some kind of validation of my own experience as I read this book. I found it, but not until Chapter 7, ‘Politics’, when I recognised in Professor Caligula many of the behaviours that had broken my physical and mental health to such an extent that I finally resigned from a job that I had loved.

As Taylor says, ‘most bullying is complex, nuanced, full of incongruities and ambiguities.’ Reading the earlier chapters of the book, I found myself thinking, sometimes uncomfortably, about my own behaviour as a primary school teacher and that of my colleagues. I remembered an incident in the mid 1970s when I had witnessed a boy being asked to remove his plimsoll so the headteacher could hit him with it and the irony of the child’s ‘thank you sir’ as his shoe was returned to him. Taylor notes that Corporal punishment was banned in British state schools in 1986, when he would have been in his early teens, ‘I was there, in school, at that watershed moment. I witnessed the change from a system based on caning to a system based on surveillance, one that attempted to act ‘on the heart, the thoughts, the will, the inclinations.’

As is evident from the title, the book is not just about bullying, it is also about discipline. Superficially, these are two separate concepts, one acceptable, the other not. ‘Discipline is the legitimate exercise of authority, bullying is illegitimate, abusive, verboten’ but, as Taylor points out, ‘the problem is that the line between them can easily seem hazy, even arbitrary.’ This haziness can result in a climate where ‘disciplinary systems reflect, even enable the bullying they were meant to deal with’ and this, Taylor argues, is ‘institutionalised bullying.’

The book is obviously of particular interest and importance to anyone who works in schools or universities but it does not confine itself solely to educational institutions and is written in such an accessible and engaging way it would appeal to a much wider audience. There are observations and memories about family, ‘in general, the nuclear family is a little machine for bullying,’ including a description of Taylor trying (and failing) to cope with the demands of two-year old twins while his wife was out for the afternoon. Ideas from Foucault, Freud, and Hegel are weaved into a narrative alongside characters from Dickens, Kes and Harry Potter – all contained within what is essentially memoir.

But A Physical Education is much more than memoir. It is an invitation for the reader to think about the nature of power, to consider, in the words of Mary Beard ‘what we mean by the voice of authority and how we’ve come to construct it.’ It challenges the status quo of our (still) overwhelmingly patriarchal and hierarchical society. ‘After all, to question someone’s authority in any hierarchical system is implicitly also to question the system itself, which is responsible for raising that person up according to its own criteria.’

Towards the end of the book is a brief account of a time when Taylor’s experience of being bullied by a particular boy was at its most intense.

After being whispered at a hundred times about my lack of British patriotism, defective testicles, and similarity thereof to Adolf Hitler, I lost my temper, stood up, and threw a chair at Lee. He threw one back, accusing me of bullying him. Like most teachers, I can well imagine this scenario, indeed, like most teachers I have faced something similar on more than one occasion. To say it is challenging would be an understatement. Not only does the teacher have to very quickly establish his or her authority, because to fail to do so could lead to complete chaos, there is also (and arguably more importantly) the need to keep pupils and staff safe in a situation which could escalate quickly.

The teacher in question was Mrs Dee, by implication someone ‘individualistic enough to resist a whole ecology of power; someone who refuses to be ventriloquised by the system bearing down on them; someone who understands that violence, discipline, and bullying are not entirely deterministic – that the bullying cycle can be broken …’ Thus Taylor challenges ‘commonplace British wisdom’ arguing that ‘less discipline can mean less misbehaviour; less violence can equal less violence. Sometimes, not punishing, not disciplining, not bullying can actually be a sign of strength rather than weakness.’

This is an important book. I hope it is read widely by teachers, academics, and politicians and by anyone who is still haunted by past bullying.

Julie Gardner

Jonathan Taylor will be talking about this book, with James Scudamore in the bookshop on 25 November: fiveleavesbookshop.co.uk/events/jonathan-taylor-and-james-scudamore-on-bullying/

This review will also appear on Everyone’s Reviewing

Books of the Year, from Ross Bradshaw

January 3, 2024 9:38 am No Comments

My reading this last year has been pretty random, and my faves are not confined to these books, but these are the ones still sitting on my desk for no good or bad reason. So these will pass as my books of the year.

Firstly, my book of the year has to be Rory Stewart’s Politics on the Edge (Cape). I’d never paid him much attention until I saw him being interviewed at length by Ash Sarkar on Novara Media. Wait a minute, here’s a former Conservative Minister engaging fully with a Muslim Marxist… The book is very well written and quite scary about the nature of real parliamentary politics. Things like there were only nine key activists in his Conservative Party in Penrith and the Border, or like when he was appointed Minister for Prisons he knew nothing at all about prisons or like when, a known expert on the Indian subcontinent, the Conservative Government gave him Africa for his brief… And when he was in charge of Africa the civil servants didn’t bother to invite him to the meeting to discuss a coup in Zimbabwe. This was government by chaos, and few come out of it well. Stewart did get stuck into improving prisons though, in his whirligig tour through department after department.

Comrades Come Rally: Manchester Communists in the 1930s and 1940s by Michael Crowley (Bookmarks) is about a world we have lost: a world of trade unionists, Jewish lefties, folk singers, bibliophiles, women workers, Spanish Civil War volunteers – the network of activists based in the old CPGB that made Manchester a radical centre at that time.

On the fiction front there’s The Painter’s Friend by Howard Cunnell (Picador), the story of an artist who ends up living on the water, in an island community of lost souls which is under threat from developers. Everyone has their own story, and there are moments of despair and of solidarity. It is fiction but I can’t help but feel there’s been many real life situations like this over the last few years.

Kairos by Kenny Erpenbeck (Granta) is perhaps my favourite novel of the year. Warning though, the core relationship in the book is one of coercive control of a young woman by an older man. The married man is of course a bastard, but there’s also a sense of what might be lost as the GDR collapses. In Siblings by Brigitte Reimann (Penguin) the GDR is still functioning. The main character is a young woman artist employed to teach painting to factory workers. The sibling aspect is about the way that three siblings deal with the GDR. One has already defected…

In one of the books – I forget which! – a visit to West Germany shows the shops full of goods, luxury everywhere, but homeless beggars too – something that would never happen on the other side of the wall.

Buchi Emecheta came to Nottingham, what?, forty years ago for a packed reading at the old WEA on Shakespeare Street. There were perhaps 150 people there. I’d not read anything of hers since then, but the reissue of her novels drew me in to The Joys of Motherhood. The book opens with a woman running away, and there’s a lot to run away from in this Nigerian novel. The bride price, a house slave being killed because she would not willingly jump into the grave of her recently deceased owner, minimal education for girls, funerals that take years to pay off, polygamy… traditional Nigerian life was as patriarchal as it could get, but did things improve with the a money economy, the move from village to Lagos, to law and order? The book gets more interesting then, with conscription of men to fight for Britain in the war against Germany (the men now knowing what side they might be on), the start of a discussion on independence, a developing Nigerian diaspora, intermarriage but also conflict between Yoruba and Igbo, the difficulties of pastoralists… And the joy of motherhood? “The joy of being a mother was the joy of giving all to your children, they said.” Maybe not.

This year Claire Keegan is no longer the author of the year – though her novella, short story really, So Late in the Day is worth reading, This year it’s Ann Patchett. Bel Canto (4th Estate) is probably her best known book, in which a group of South American terrorists/freedom fighters take over a Government residency expecting to catch the Vice President and negotiate for their cause. He’s not at the function so they find themselves in control of an opera singer, a Japanese businessman and a cast of others. The negotiations drag on and on, and on, with the terrorists and their charges finding ways of being together… one terrorist takes up opera. How will it end? Patchett keeps us guessing, but we engage with her characters as they engage with each other. Patchett’s These Precious Days (Bloomsbury) probably would not have been published if Patchett was not already a famous writer, but fortunately she is and it has been. The subjects range from Snoopy to Patchett’s views of the covers of her books internationally, including Bel Canto. The stand out essay though is the one that gives the book title. Patchett gets to know Tom Hanks’ PA, Sooki. They become friends, with Sooki moving in to see out the COVID pandemic – and possibly her life, as she had pancreatic cancer. It’s a marvellous invocation of female friendship.

We know that the author of Clouds over Paris (Pushkin) did die. Felix Hartlaub was a German soldier who did not survive the war.. This book comprises his notebooks about his time in Paris in the German occupation. He did nothing bad, just observed what was going on. The book is slight, the author’s casual observations are those of a travel writer abroad in a strange city. But he is a close observer and the book adds something to the category of what ordinary Germans did or thought during the war. He would, it is clear, have been a great writer, but this anti-Nazi German did not survive the war, missing presumed dead in Berlin in 1945.

Two more, and that will be enough. Carson McCullers The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (Penguin) has a large cast and we get to know them. In the Deep South John Singer, a deaf mute, becomes the confidant of many people, Black and white. Like McCullers Singer is – well, probably is – gay, many times an outsider. The others who float through the book include a hardworking but despairing Black doctor, teenagers, the owner of an all night cafe where the lost souls of that town turn up. Any one of the characters could form the basis of a good novel. McCullers offers them all to us. Maybe, typing these words, this was my book of the year.

Finally, let’s get a little more specialist with Rain of Ash: Roma, Jews and the Holocaust by Ari Joskowicz (Princeton). For many reasons – cultural, political, economic – the industrial scale murder of Roma and Sinti people in WW2 has been barely covered, either by the survivors or by outside commentators, compared to other aspects of the Holocaust. The late Donald Kenrick’s work is worth searching out if this subject interests you. The strength of Rain and Ash, however, is in its detailed description of how Roma and Sinti people worked with Jewish organisations to seek recognition of the genocide they experienced. Indeed they had to fight to have it understood that Roma and Sinti people were persecuted on racial grounds.

So, enough… it’s been a good year for reading. This piece could have been a lot longer, but I did not want to try your patience.

All in stock or available to order at Five Leaves

Ross Bradshaw

Labour Revolt in Britain 1910-14 by Ralph Darlington

October 23, 2023 9:54 am No Comments

A review by Mike Hamlin

I first learnt about British Labour History as a student in the 1960s, through such books as Allen Hutt’s British Trade Unionism (1941), and A. L. Morton & George Tates’s The British Labour Movement (1957). These were grand, chronological narratives, starting early in the
nineteenth century and finishing around the time of the second world war. They would cover, in the course of a few brief chapters – The Growth and Decline of Chartism, The New Unionism 1880-1900, The Origins of the Labour Party 1900-1910, The Great Unrest 1910 -14, The Post-War Crisis 1919-24 and finally, The General Strike and After 1925-29.

They were written in a clear, confident style and broadly reflected the political outlook of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Empirical exemplification was sometimes rather thin but the overall narrative was straightforward and often uplifting, even through periods of setback and temporary defeat. Morton and Tate in particular, had a well-thumbed chapter on ‘Socialism and the Great Unrest’ and judging by my detailed annotations, I must have used it as the basis for more than one long forgotten essay or talk!

Re-reading for this review, much came flooding back and I was surprised how well it had prepared me for Ralph Darlington’s important new study. ‘Labour Unrest’ is here, more accurately, replaced by ‘Labour Revolt’ and the incisive focus on the years 1910-14 are given the space they deserve across 336 detailed pages. The book’s starting point is that the ‘Labour Revolt’ that swept Britain in the four years leading up to First World War was one of the most sustained, dramatic and violent explosions of industrial militancy and social conflict that this country has ever experienced.

‘The strike wave involved a number of large-scale disputes in strategically important sections of the economy. A protracted strike in the South Wales coalfield in 1910-11 was followed in the summer of 1911 by national seamen’s, dockers’ and railway workers’ strikes, as well as a Liverpool general transport strike. There were national miners’ and London transport workers’ strikes in 1912, a series of Midlands metal workers’ strikes and Dublin transport workers’ lockout in 1913, and a London building workers’ lockout in 1914.’

During this time, a significant proportion of the industrial workforce took part in 4,600 other strikes for higher wages, better working conditions and union recognition. Women workers were also involved, often for the first time and school students walked out of their schools in the September of 1911. The strikes were on a totally new scale and mobilised a wide and diverse range of often younger workers.

‘It was a revolt dominated by unskilled and semi-skilled workers, encompassing both members of established and recognised trade unions, and also workers hitherto unorganized and/or unrecognized who became engaged in a fight to build collective organization and for union recognition against the hostility of many employers. Action largely took place unofficially and independently of national trade union leaderships’

This youthful energy and the spontaneous dynamic of the militancy, from both men and women, once unleashed, took most of the more traditional Labour movement leaders by surprise. However, Jim Larkin, a leader of the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union, acutely and accurately observed that ‘labour has lost its old humility and its respectful finger touching its cap’ . Outcomes were impressive. Across the four years, overall trade union membership increased by 62%, from 2.5 million in 1910 to 4.1 million in 1914. The proportion of workers who were union members (union density) rose from 14.6% to 23%. And the number of women workers represented by trade unions increased by an encouraging 54%, breaking out into areas beyond its previous textile industry enclave.

Inevitably, there were underlying limitations and weaknesses, serious strike setbacks and defeats. On the industrial front – ‘national trade union officials were able to reassert their authority and control over embryonic rank-and-file networks’. And in terms of national politics – ‘The Liberal government was able to accommodate the simultaneous three ‘rebellions’ (labour strikes, threat of civil war in Ireland and the campaign for women’s suffrage) because they were essentially discrete struggles only bound together tangentially in a diffuse and uncoordinated fashion’. But most significantly of all – ‘the strike wave was to suddenly shudder to a halt, stopped in its tracks by the onset of the First World War in August 1914.

This is an important book, in many ways definitive. For me, its main strength lies in its specific focus on those four crucial years 1910-14. Its structure is also, to my mind, exemplary. It’s arranged in four parts. Part one (two chapters) provides the general backdrop and context to the revolt: industrially, socially, economically and politically. Part two, which forms the majority of the book (five chapters in all), details the scope and outcomes of the strike waves themselves, moving chronologically, across the years under consideration. Part three, is a thematic and analytical assessment of the most distinctive features of the strike wave with a focus on new forms of industrial organization and militancy, along with broader aspects of explicitly political radicalization. Finally, part four looks at the aftermath and legacy, industrially and politically, both during the war years and immediately after.

The concluding bibliography, too often missing from studies these days, is also worthy of a mention. And here, taking up a full chapter-length to itself, we have a resource which is both richly extensive and incredibly useful in its own right.

Labour Revolt in Britain 1910-14 fundamentally aligns with Bob Holton’s earlier study British Syndicalism 1900 -1914 (also published by Pluto), in concluding that much of the ‘labour revolt’ of these years acquired ‘proto-syndicalist’ aspects – i.e. demonstrated ‘forms of social action which lie between vague revolt and clear-cut revolutionary action’. At the time, Holton (writing in 1976) made the challenge that ‘writers on the ‘labour unrest’ have not however, taken up and developed this theme. Analysis of social consciousness and behaviour during the strike wave remains extremely thin and often superficial, with the activities and motives of those who participated still rather obscure.’ With this new book, Darlington has categorically risen to Holton’s challenge and has answered each of his points fully and convincingly.

In short, Ralph Darlington and Pluto Press have produced a lively, impeccably researched and politically informed work – it deserves to be read and enjoyed by any serious labour historian.

This review first appeared in the newsletter of the Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire Labour History Society

Labour Revolt in Britain is available at Five Leaves Bookshop or by mail order at fiveleavesbookshop.co.uk/product/labour-revolt-in-britain-1910-14/

Wish You Were Here by Nicola Monaghan (Verve, £9.99)

August 27, 2023 3:39 pm No Comments

Nicola Monaghan is Nottingham-based and someone I know but do not be put off by any potential bias I may have, she stands very tall without my recommendation. Her debut novel The Killing Jar won the Betty Task award and is an amazing and disturbing read. She has since published novels, novellas, short stories and screen plays. Wish You Were Here is her second in the Dr Love Mystery Series. The first being the well-received Dead Flowers published in 2019.

Wish You Were Here is a crime mystery set in Nottingham, with a strong female lead, Dr Sian Love, a DNA expert, and ex-copper. The story centres on a child who went missing over fifteen years ago and a young woman who thinks she may be the adult girl. The plot adeptly takes you through a labyrinth of clues filled with contemporary and local references, and the interweave of factual and fictional, adds authenticity, pulling you into the centre of the story. Dr Love has complexity and intelligence and as she develops, the mystery unravels. This is a multi-layered story including celebrity scandals, a German Shepherd dog called Elvis*, undercover policing, the hippie and rave scene, Nottingham, London and Bexhill on Sea, with some class politics thrown in. There is tension and shock, and you will be pleased to hear that I swore loudly, on at least a couple of occasions. This is the second book in a series and the story, and characters easily stand alone. I am not a great reader of mysteries /crime fiction, yet this book reminded me why I used to pick up the odd Ruth Rendall. The story is fully engaging and has a pace and tension which is escapism at its best. The end leaves you with both resolution and curiosity for more.

Which takes me to the Nottingham link. My only criticism of this book is the proposition that Dr Love could go undercover in Nottingham when we all know that we all know each other. Someone would definitely have come up her and said ‘ay up, what are you doing here?’ When Nicola Monaghan was writing this book, she was living down the road from me which is why Dr Sian Love gets the same bus into town as I do. The first novel in this series was based in the Loggerheads, a pub that used to stand off Cliff Road in the centre of town. Wish You Were Here references Broadway, The Old Angel, The Sumac centre amongst many other familiarities, all of which add to an additional level of pleasure for Nottingham readers and are well enough described to become real for those from out of town. Just as Nottingham and the Peacock pub hosted Resnick on our TV screens in the 1990’s, I have hope for Dr Sian Love be visioned off the page. If you are Nottingham-based – it is time you got to know this excellent local writer and if you are out of town and like a good mystery with a great female lead, then this also for you.

Cathy Symes

*A silent tribute to Nicola’s own dog called Elvis

Wish You Were Here is available instore and here: fiveleavesbookshop.co.uk/product/wish-you-were-here/

A Length of Road: finding myself in the footsteps of John Clare, by Robert Hamberger

August 24, 2023 1:36 pm No Comments

How do you choose to read a book? a recommendation or a good fly leaf ? I often wonder at gems which disappear through the cracks. This book which came to me via a promotion event at the Five Leave Bookshop which I was drawn to because of my interest in the poet John Clare.

John Clare known as the ‘peasant poet’ had little education, was poor, and worked as a farm labourer. At times relying on parish relief. The brilliance of his poetry, filled with intelligence, and lyrical beauty, was a giant leap from the expectations of his class. He brought language, grammar and detailed observations of the natural world which could only be born from his experience of working rural life. For these reasons, in addition to the struggles he had with his mental health, he was someone who my parents loved and championed. Hence my interest.

A Length of Road is written by the poet Robert Hamberger, it is his account of walking in 1995, from Epping Forest to Northamptonshire. Retracing the route take by John Clare in 1841, when he escaped from a psychiatric hospital in Essex and walked over 80 miles home. Later that year he was committed to the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum (now St Andrews Hospital) eventually dying there in 1864.

Robert Hemberger, chose to make this journey in reverence to John Clare, and to face his own personal demons. At the time his relationship with his wife was ending and he was on the cusp of permanently moving out from her and their three children. The book is well written and stands alone as a reflective memoir. Robert leads us through a working-class childhood, his loss of father figures, meeting his wife and having children, the cherishing and loss of male friendships. The strength of this book lies in his honesty and his own sense of culpability. There is an avoidance of placing blame on others which enables us to share with Robert his struggles with mental health and considerations of gender and sexuality. Without gaining conclusion Robert emerges from the roadside with knowledge as to his own resilience.

This writing skilfully takes you between the landscape of John Clare, his life and works to Robert’s story and poetry. Contrasting a landscape, which passes the same road markers and plants as Claire did in 1841 and is now also populated by lorries, the A1 and fast-food restaurants. Change and our journey through it, appearing to be the theme of this book.

This is a thoughtful account of personal growth, and a great introduction to the poetry of both John Clare and Robert Hemberger. I have read many well promoted books and memoirs which I have enjoyed much less. All hail to John Clare.

All nature has a feeling by John Clare

All nature has a feeling: woods, fields, brooks
Are life eternal: and in silence they
Speak happiness beyond the reach of books;
There’s nothing mortal in them; their decay
Is the green life of change; to pass away
And come again in blooms revivified.
Its birth was heaven, eternal it its stay,
And with the sun and moon shall still abide
Beneath their day and night and heaven wide.

Cathy Symes

150 Bookstores You Need To Visit Before You Die, by Elizabeth Stamp (Lannoo, £30)

June 12, 2023 11:46 am No Comments

I can’t be the only bookseller with a shelf of books on bookshops… children’s (The Missing Bookshop); memoir (David Elliot’s A Trade of Charms); Shaun Bythell; Death of a Bookseller. I could go on.

But maybe it’s time to take that world tour. Some of the bookshops are predictable: Shakespeare & Co., City Lights, Daunt’s Marylebone Street but most I’ve never heard of. If the other shop staff don’t mind, I’m nipping out to Cheche Books in Nairobi on my next day off. It’s a small, beautiful Pan-African feminist place. If the rota offers me a weekend, I’m off to the Yanjiyou Capsule Bookstore in China. It has twenty capsule sleeping spaces as well as a huge sunken reading room with a glass wall looking out to woods. I’ll skip the Tengda Zhongshuge place though, as its confusing decor looks like it was designed by someone who wants to distract the reader. If it’s a long weekend I’ll revisit the American Colony Hotel bookshop in East Jerusalem for the best selection of books on the Israel/Palestine conflict, and you can get an inexpensive coffee in the Hotel, watching those who come with a security detail…

Lots of the shops are in beautiful old buildings, lots are designed by architects and some are both, such as Van Der Velde in De Broeren, 500 years old yet contemporary and enormous. I could go on.

Great pics. Text a little cloying at times. Cover utilitarian and a bit annoying… the Enjoy! bit.

Available here: fiveleavesbookshop.co.uk/product/150-bookstores-you-need-to-visit-before-you-die/

Ross Bradshaw

The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak (Penguin, £8.99)

June 12, 2023 7:56 am 1 Comment

The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak (Penguin, £8.99) was Five Leaves’ best selling fiction novel last year. Have you read it?
I was mixed about it. If I were to say that one of the main characters in the book was a fig tree that might put you off. It would have put me off, but I went with the flow.
The fig tree in question lived in Cyprus, originally, but was transplanted to a north London suburb by Kostas, a Greek in exile from home.
There he had a youthful relationship with Defne, a Turkish woman, both crossing the boundaries of their ethnic groups, secretly meeting in a tavern run by another couple, who had their own secret. They were gay men. The fig tree was a feature of the taverna, and it had its own views and internal life and its own perspective on the relationship between trees and humans.
Of course it all goes wrong. The conflict between the Greek and Turkish community ends the relationship. And the gay men are… well, spoiler alert, what so often happens in fiction?
Years on, Kosta returns to Cyprus for a conference – trees are, not surprisingly, his special acadamic interest. There he meets Defne again, working to find the graves of the disappeared in the conflict. There is more in their past that they need to revisit than he knew.
This is starting to read like a blurb, but it would be too easy to give more spoilers.
Island of Missing Trees is written as popular fiction, and is in serious need of an editor to get rid of some of the cliched writing. But Shafak tells a good story, and the fate of other characters drew me back to look up the half forgotten but vicious conflict that has kept the island divided.
A companion book if you want to read further is Nicosia Beyond Borders: voices from a divided city (Saqi, £12.99), with pieces by writers on both sides of the last city in Europe that remains divided.

Ross Bradshaw

Fiction
		Tom Lake by Ann Patchett (Bloomsbury, £9.99) Tom Lake is not a person but a lake in Michigan. There Lara, the main character in this novel, has a youthful affair with an actor who would go on to be famous while she turns her back on an acting career. Decades later, working hard picking cherries on their family farm, Lara drip-feeds the story of that relationship to her three grown-up daughters in great detail. To match the slow unveiling of the story I read the book slowly, over many days, the better to savour Patchett’s telling. –Ross
		Playground by Richard Powers(Hutchinson Heinemann, £20) Powers’ new novel is exploration of the ocean and the future of humanity, weaving together themes of technology, ecology, and human connection. The novel dives into the potential of artificial intelligence and its impact, while also examining the delicate balance between human progress, the human experience and the preservation of our natural environment. Much like The Overstory, one of my favourite novels, Playground is a thought-provoking, beautifully written novel that manages to bridge subject depth, sympathy with complex and troubled characters with high readability. Powers’ masterful storytelling is once again on top form. –Carl
		Red Side Story by Jasper Fforde(Hodder & Stoughton, £20) The (very) long-awaited sequel to Fforde’s brilliant Shades of Grey (2011) did not disappoint. It’s set in a future where civilisation has rebuilt itself after a mysterious ‘Something That Happened’ with strict societal rules and roles based on the colours people can see. Eddie Russett intends to use his better-than-average red perception to marry above his station, but when he falls for Jane, a lowly Grey with a fierce temper, he starts to challenge the strict chromatic dogma imposed by National Colour, and discovers layers upon layers of lies. –Pippa
		Monstrum by Lottie Mills (Oneworld, £16.99) This featured as my first read of the month when I joined Five Leaves, and I’ve not stopped thinking about it since. It’s rare to read a short story collection where each story feels ‘stand-out’. These are inventive and emotional stories that had me crying on a train and impatiently excited to read whatever Mills writes next. –Sarah

Non-Fiction
		Daybreak in Gaza: Stories of Palestinian Lives and Culture edited by Matthew Teller, Mahmoud Muna, Juliette Touma, Jayyab Abusafia (Saqi Books, £14.99) This book includes historic pieces, older articles and nearly up to date stories by people from Gaza. The book goes beyond the obvious, so there’s material on Christianity, the Dom (the local Romani equivalent group) and a short memoir by one of the African minority in Gaza. When Matthew and Mahmoud came to the shop they played voice notes of some of the Gazan authors talking to them – the editing process – and you could hear bombs going off in the background and drones overhead. –Ross
		Bound by Maddie Ballard (The Emma Press, £9.99) Structured around items of clothing Ballard has made for herself since starting to sew in the pandemic, this memoir reflects on self-image, over-consumption, labour and exploitation, family, love, race, belonging. It’s a small book you could read in a day, but I would encourage you to take your time and really soak up the beautiful language and moving reflections Ballard offers. –Sarah
		Wild Service: Why Nature Needs You by Nick Hayes (Bloomsbury, £20) A fantastic book of essays from some of the most influential voices in the Right to Roam movement, as edited by Nick Hayes (author of The Book of Trespass). The essays are widely varied and from a diverse range of voices, some showing how and why Britain became one of the most nature-depleted countries in Europe while some are more creative, incorporating poetry and stories of beauty. The main chapters are interspersed with profiles of regular people doing inspiring things for the land and their communities, plus musings on places where humans interact with nature (from rope swings to clootie trees) and Hayes’ striking illustrations. –Kate
		Anxiety: A Philosophical Guide by Samir Chopra (PRINCETON U.P., £22) Samir Chopra delves into the nature of anxiety, examining how it has been understood by various philosophical thinkers throughout history. He argues that anxiety is not necessarily a pathology but rather an integral part of the human condition. He suggests that rather than seeking to eradicate anxiety, we can learn from it, learn to understand it, and manage it in a way that allows us to live calmer, happier lives. An essential read for anyone seeking to better understand their own anxiety, how the human mind works or how philosophy can help still the vexations inherent in all of us. –Carl
		Every Man for Himself and God against All: A Memoir by Werner Herzog, Michael Hofmann (Vintage, £10.99) The title of this book says it all. The thing that strikes one about Herzog, one of the most important directors in post-war European cinema, is his absolute unwavering commitment to and faith in his artistic vision. Not for Herzog, the ordinary watered-down path. What some might call obsession, he calls his life’s work. He strides forth and passionately does what he sets out to do. He talks like he writes and his writing is full of vigour and life, wild and fascinating stories and strange and brilliant ideas. His memoir will make you see the world differently and wake you up. Guaranteed. -Giselle
		Against Technoableism: Rethinking Who Needs Improvement by Ashley Shew (WW Norton, £9.99) (Back in stock soon) Everyone should read this book! Incredibly accessible (pun intended), this is a funny and comprehensive introduction to the ways in which technology shapes our lives and how we think about disability, cure, advancement and access. If we’re lucky to live long enough, we will all become disabled at some point in our lives. It’s time we stopped thinking of assistive technologies as a niche topic that doesn’t already impact how we move about the world. –Sarah
		The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic by Alan Moore, Steve Moore (Knockabout Comics, £39.99) I should just start off by saying that, despite the tricksy cover, this is not a book of card trick for kids. In fact there’s rather too much sex, drugs, and demon summoning in it to even leave it on the lower shelves of the bookshop, lest a curious child picks it and ruins the carpet by summoning a fire elemental. Mixing a comic book styled history of magic, with essays on occult philosophy and a healthy dose of irreverent weirdness (there’s a maze that winds through the Qabalistic Tree of Life), this could only have come from the mind of famed comic book author Alan Moore (Watchmen, V for Vendetta). Possibly the strangest and most delightful thing I’ve come across this year. -Kate
		The Body in the Library by Graham Caveney (Peninsula Press £12.99) I’m in a book, and so is Five Leaves… Graham Caveney describes me as a 60s man of rabbinic appearance who looks as if he never leaves the bookshop. This is calumny. I left the bookshop on Tuesday. Didn’t like the outside world much and came back… But in this book Graham is describing his time working at Five Leaves – his first job for many years – which led to him returning to writing and recovery, all of which leads up to this, his third memoir, but the body in question is his, and that body is failing. He’s just had an improbable 60th birthday, and the book explains that improbability. It’s a book about dying, and not quite dying, about literature and friendship. And is introduced by Jonathan Coe, who’d said that if Graham didn’t finish the book Jon would finish it for him. He didn’t have to for Graham is still with us. –Ross

Non-Fiction
		A Flat Place by Noreen Masud (Penguin, £10.99) Morecambe Bay, Orford Ness, the Fens, Orkney Islands… all of these written about in A Flat Place. I picked it up like an idiot shopper in hurry, checking those names and its “nature-writing” looking cover. And on page nine there’s “The first time the therapist had mentioned complex trauma…” What? So, add Lahore to the list of places, add dealing with Complex PTSD and you get a very different book than the one I’d hurriedly grabbed for a Friday night read. There is nature too in this complex memoir. -Ross
		Time for Magic : A Shamanarchist’s Guide to the Wheel of the Year by Jamie Reid, Stephen Ellcock, Philip Carr-Gomm, John Marchant (Watkins, £26.99) A beautiful book on the art of the (until now) unjustly overlooked artist Jamie Reid. Best known for his work with the Sex Pistols -particularly that iconic image of her late majesty- Reid continued producing political art throughout his life, including for XR and Pussy Riot. Reid was also a lifelong Druid, and many of his works were based on the eight druid seasonal festivals. In a delightfully idiosyncratic format, each chapter starts with an article by Philip Carr Gomm, former Chief of the Order of Bards, Ovates, and Druids, explaining the symbolism of each festival. Despite giving Reid the authorship it was published posthumously and begins with biography of the artist and includes stories of from his life woven throughout. –Kate
		The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber & David Wengrow (Penguin, £12.99) This is a book I passionately advocate to everyone I know. It deserves all of its fawning and seemingly endless cover quotes. Yes, it will turn everything you thought you knew about the so-called trajectory of history on its head. Yes, it will suggest astounding possibilities you probably haven’t considered. Revolutionary, fascinating, challenging, and entertaining, a book to return to. -Giselle
		The Moon Looks At Them All: of friends and friendship By John Lucas (Greenwich Exchange, £14.99) This book is primarily about male friendship and friendship with poets at that. Those who’ve been around the literary scene a while will be most interested, but there is also a chapter on Brian Clough who Lucas did not meet but admired, Ted, who the author worked with on a building site almost seventy years ago, and several trad jazz colleagues, who were most definitely not on the literary scene. -Ross

Book Reviews

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Non-Fiction