A Later Call

2013 will soon be upon us. Had he lived, the novelist Angus Wilson would be 100 in August of that year. Wilson's fiction was admired by a band of other writers including Paul Bailey, Ian McEwan and Rose Tremain. His book Anglo-Saxon Attitudes was the big British novel of 1956, and serialised on television by Andrew Davies (who has the franchise for televised literary works), though people say Wilson's best book may have been Late Call. Margaret Drabble did a big posthumous biography of Angus Wilson, but his star has gradually faded while other writers of his period - Iris Murdoch and William Golding for example have not. Ever willing to take on a challenge, Five Leaves is planning a critical book on Wilson for publication in 2013 (don't rush your orders just yet) and after meeting the author Paul Binding tonight we have a title, A Later Call, which somehow seems rather apt.

It also seems apt to illustrate this posting with an old photograph of Wilson out campaigning for Public Lending Right for authors, given that our government has just announced the closure of the well-respected quango, the PLR Agency.

Stanley Middleton

This week's Times Literary Supplement includes an overview by Paul Binding of the work of Nottingham novelist Stanley Middleton, who died earlier this year shortly before his 90th birthday. An overview was overdue. Binding picks out 1972-1984 as the key period of Middleton's work, starting with Cold Gradations and ending with The Daysman, with other high points including the earlier Harris's Requiem. While Trent Editions republished the latter, a small handful only of Middleton's late period titles are available. It would be wonderful if his main publisher, Hutchinson, could release some of his best work on print on demand, the equivalent of Faber Finds.

We were lucky enough to be the publisher of Holiday, Stanley Middleton's Booker winner, until Random House took back the rights earlier this year. It was fun having a Booker Prize winner on our list, and Stanley, gentleman that he was, refused all royalties and insisted on buying any copies he wanted at the full retail. We do still have some copies of Stanley Middleton at Eighty available.

Meanwhile, for those of you organised enough to have next year's diary, Paul Binding will be one of the speakers at a bookish celebration of Stanley Middleton's life on Saturday May 8th, from 2.00-4.30 at Nottingham University.

The event will be free but places will need to be booked. Full details are not available yet, but you can email Five Leaves meantime to make sure you are sent the programme.

Anybody really, really well organised may want to put a note in their 2013 diary that we will be publishing a critical overview of the novels of Angus Wilson by Paul Binding, that year being AW's centenary.