Andy Croft and Martin Rowson book launch

Carousel review for Closer

We occasionally post summaries of reviews, but sometimes it feels like we should post entire reviews. In this case, our author Maxine Linnell is very pleased with this review of her young adult novel Closer. The review appears in the current issue of the children's/young adult review magazine Carousel and is written by Yvonne Coppard. Closer is available in paperback and as an eBook.

Mel is a teenager who feels increasingly disconnected - from life, from family, and from any hope of happiness with Raj, the boy she really likes but whom she can’t believe is interested in her. She wars with her older sister and is irritated by her younger brother Only her stepfather seems to know how to reach her. And as the story goes on, we realise there is something Mel isn’t telling us - the darkest secret of all, the fear that hovers in the heart of every careful parent. Her stepfather is too close, and Mel doesn’t know what to do about it. There are many autobiographies in the best-seller charts that deal with the manipulation and sexual abuse of children. Strange then, that the most realistic, most compelling read I’ve come across for a long time is this piece of fiction. For most abuse is not defined by abduction, enslavement and involving terrified obedience. No, most of it is manipulation, a distortion of genuine love and buried in the heart of a family that becomes increasingly dysfunctional without understanding why it is happening. Mel’s hesitant, half-told account of what’s going on builds the suspense; there are no gory details; we kind-of know what’s coming but can’t be sure what will happen next. It’s impossible to make a story like this ring true for everyone, but as a sensitive and realistic portrayal of the complexity of incest and the quiet devastation it wreaks on a family, this is up there with the best I’ve read.
Yvonne Coppard

Joanne Limburg book launch

Publishing the future, in Leicester

The grass may not always be greener, but Leicester is fortunate to have Leicester Writers Club - which is, I believe, the second oldest such club in the country. The format has been the same throughout the decades - a weekly manuscript meeting where people can read out their work, for comment; regular speakers; an annual dinner; presentation of prizes (some annual cups are a bit battered these days); a residential weekend. If I was a writer living in Leicester, with £50 to spare I'd join it. The crime novelist Rod Duncan said that he would have been a writer without LWC, but definitely not a published writer. But at a time when many writing groups have bit the dust, in part overtaken by the spread of university creative writing courses, LWC continues to flourish, drawing in new writers all the time.
Earlier this week I attended a packed session on E-publishing, which both inspired and worried me. At the start Chris Meade of the Institute for the Future of the Book (If: Book) said that the publisher was dead, that there was no need for them (hang on - that's me he's talking about!), that the future was the direct relationship between the author and the reader, filtered only through the hands of new technology. He was big on apps. Chris was followed by Amanda Grange, a successful writer who has become much more successful by moving to self publishing. Her biggest criticism of the outgoing publishing model was the time element - any "new" book takes at least a year to come out, while ebooks enable the same book to hit the computer screens the same day. Editing? Proof-reading? Typesetting? Design? Buy it in. Stephen Baker, who runs a company dedicated to conversion of the written word to ebooks concurred. John Martin from Leicester Libraries outlined his authority policy on loaning ebooks, pointing out some difficulties in that Kindle ie Amazon in the UK will not sign up to have their formats loanable, so you need a tablet to read a borrowed ebook from Leicester Libraries. By this time some members of the audience were reaching for their medical tablets, others had been noting down every word. I got the feeling Amazon was about to be hit by many previously unpublished or out of print backlist books, uploaded by the morning.
Save for John Martin, the whole panel was evangelical about the new future we are marching towards. Bookshops? Never mentioned. I'm pleased that LWC ran the session, an indication of their confidence, though I'd have preferred to have seen someone (not me) on the panel from the traditional publishing industry.

Wittering on

Some people have already seen this interview via Facebook, but I thought I'd post it here too a this is a slightly more permanent record. The youtube interview by Ambrose Musiyiwa was undertaken live at States of Independence in Leicester, and is about small press publishing and States itself. When I say "a slightly more permanent record" this is not because I normally would want my words to be chiseled into stone, but simply because it does explain something about the ethos behind States, and Five Leaves. Not that book fairs/conventions of this nature are anything new, it is just that there is more of a spring in the step of indies about events like this nowadays and they are spreading, like a rather benign rash, across the country. Here's the interview:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCs948aUBRw&feature=youtu.be

Penny Lace

Hilda Lewis was one of Nottinghamshire's most popular writers in her day. Her historical fiction, with dust jackets designed by the local artist Evelyn Gibbs were widely read. In recent years several have come back into print, though her best-known work now is The Ship That Flew, something of a classic children's book first published in 1939. The historical fiction was well researched and is admired by modern genre writers such as Alison Weir for the author's use of witchcraft, murder, scandal and a rich collection of rogues. Titles include a I am Mary Tudor and Wife to Charles II.
Hilda Lewis was born in London, in a Jewish family, but lived in Nottingham most of her life, dying in 1974. One of her novels, Penny Lace, stands out from the others though - not for its quality (of which more later) - but for its setting, in Nottingham's lace trade. Although the book ran to several impressions after first publication in 1942 it slipped from memory. Indeed, it was the only one of her books that Humphrey Lewis, Hilda's son did not own. I eventually picked up a battered copy from a second-hand bookshop. Humphrey wanted to buy it off me - at twice the price! - but I offered to reprint the book instead as part of the Bromley House Editions series, which revisits forgotten Nottinghamshire classics first found in the recesses of Nottingham's membership library, Bromley House.
What had attracted me to the book was not its overall quality - it would not have won the 1942 Booker Prize had it existed then - but the novel gives a real feel of the factory of the time, the 1890s: "He cast an impatient eye down the great bare room, lit, thought it was barely ten in the morning, by fish-tail flames; driven by draught, they jerked like live creatures imprisoned in their wire cages. As far as he could see, all the other machines were at work - every one. Clatter, clatter, shrieked the machines. Pistons rose and fell. His feet pricked with the vibrations. The whole place was full of deafening, rhythmical sound." The "he" in question was Nicholas Penny, a factory worker. Penny had similar attitudes to Arthur Seaton in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. He was a manual worker who was all out for himself. He hated the bosses but had no time for the union either; he saw women as objects for his own use. But unlike Sillitoe's Seaton Penny decided to take on the bosses at their own game. He learned the trade inside out, working out how he could do all the jobs - making twist-lace, burnt-lace, wool-lace, nets, bleaching, dyeing - with new, modern Continental machines operating in factories over the border in Long Eaton, outside the reach of Nottingham unions. This is not, as I said, the best-written novel in the world - Hilda Lewis must have worn out the exclamation key on her typewriter in the writing - but it is an important book for anyone interested in lace making or Nottingham's industrial history.

Time marches

Five Leaves two big March projects were the Lowdham Book Festival Winter Weekend and the Leicester States of Independence day. No offence to the rest of March, but I'd like to catch up with my sleep now. Lowdham hasn't had a winter weekend every year, but returned to the idea to fill the gap left by Flicks on the Sticks. After ten years our successful, but loss-making, film weekend, was put to bed - at least for a while. The winter weekend's theme was Local Heroes. It's not on the same scale as the summer festival, but 600 attendances over the weekend was encouraging and, unlike Flicks, we turned a modest profit which will help towards the summer funding. The highlight for me was the evening with the screen writer Billy Ivory (as in Made in Dagenham), who used to empty the bins in Lowdham in an earlier life.
The Five Leaves staff is, however, most in need of a few zzzzs following States of Independence, run jointly with our friends of the Creative Writing Team at De Montfort University. This was not a good year to run it for any of us due to other commitments but we worried about losing momentum, especially within DMU, and decided to run a "full strength" States rather than cut back. We were pushed but we did it. States is a celebration of (small scale) independent publishing - somewhere between a book festival and a convention. And it's free. This year attendance was a bit down, around 420, but people stayed for longer, usually several hours, attending the performances and discussions, buying books or just networking. The initial idea was to focus on the East Midlands with some help from Our Friends in the West (Midlands) but this year there were stalls from CB Editions in London, Shearsman in Bristol and Inpress from Newcastle as well as our home grown publishers. Poetry was well, possibly over, represented in the programme but that also meant excellent sales at some poetry presses (Longbarrow from Sheffield for example) which specialise in crafted publications in unusual formats - the kind of material only seen at such book fairs.
I was stuck on admin/Five Leaves duty all day but I heard very good things especially about the future of the book industry panel (chaired by Pippa Hennessy from Five Leaves on her first outing as a panel chair in any setting) and the discussion about small press comics run by the Leicester enthusiasts from Factor Fiction. The level of co-operation in the day was shown by several poets deciding to run Candlestick's session after the editor had to pull out at the last minute due to illness. None of the readers have been, I think, published by Candlestick and they had little prep time but it was lovely that they ran an emergency reading service rather than just let that session lapse. Another couple of presses ensured that Candlestick's stall was delivered and returned, with DMU students staffing it. I like also that this event is always younger and more multi-cultural than any other literature event I go to.
Events like States involve hard work from a lot of people but they are a way that independent presses can showcase their work and talk to their friends and relations. Friends in Birmingham are discussing how best to move forward with their own States of Independence, while on September 8th CB Editions is organising their second Free Verse, see: http://www.poetrybookfair.com/.
The programme for our States of Independence is still on http://www.statesofindependence.co.uk/.
ps An important part of the day comprises publishing workers buying from other publishers. My purchases were the latest issue of Dream Catcher, to pamphlets from the Nottingham "People's Histreh" group (though as one Nottinghamian said, if they really want to mirror the accent it should be 'istreh), a David Morley poetry collection from Templar that I'd not seen before and Jack Robinson's Days and Nights in W12 meditation (CB Editions). My Five Leaves colleague Pippa bought most of the other books on sale judging by the weight of her rucksack.