What the papers say

February was an interesting month for Five Leaves in the press. Yes we made the crime reviews in the Hull Daily Mail (thank you Nick Quantrill) but I hope Nick and the entire Hull population won't be upset if I class the full page in the current Times Literary Supplement as being more of a winner. The page, by Roz Caveney, was about our Roland Camberton books, especially Scamp. Unfortunately not online, the review spots a lot in his books that made us want to publish them after sixty years of unavailability, pointing out that "Scamp feels more interesting than it perhaps did on publication". Alone this looks like damning with faint praise, which is not the tone of the article. She ends saying "Like Scamp, Rain on the Pavements belongs to a tradition of London fiction which is partly journalistic; its consolations are not plot and character, but observation and vivid recall." Our New London Editions have been covered well in Hackney Citizen and Camberton again in Jewish Renaissance.

At the other end of the country, Zoe Wicomb hit the Sunday Herald with The One that Got Away while J. David Simons had a perfectly formed and good review for his The Liberation of Celia Kahn in the Herald guide. David's book is getting coverage in book blogs including Vulpes Libris, while the Jewish Telegraph gave a big spread to the Glasgow book launch. Our Crime Express series is starting to get coverage on specialist crime blogs, with http://www.spinetinglermag.com/ writer "Nerd of Noir" taking a big liking to Graven Image by Charlie Williams and California by noirista (a word borrowed from Mike Ripley) Ray Banks. John Lucas wouldn't know an e-zine or a blog if it came up and hit him but was very pleased by the print out of Michael Bartholemew-Biggs' review of Things to Say in London Grip, which has reached 27 issues but was new to me. B-B's review is on http://www.londongrip.com/LondonGrip/Poetry_review_Bartholomew-Biggs.html. More conventionally, by Lucas standards, the great Jim Burns reviewed the same book in the current Ambit. Parochially I was pleased to see a review of Ray Gosling's Personal Copy in The Nottinghamshire Historian. Because of that other business with Ray his book has not had as much attention as it deserves so it was nice of Denys Ridgeway to ignore that other business remarking that "His memoirs really do capture the mood of the younger generation [of the 1960s], how they lived and behaved."