Five Leaves Publications

Book details

Winter at the Bookshop was a raw, warm, cold experience. Raw with chapped fingers clutching kettles of boiling water from the gas-stove, multiple draughts whistling up and down the stairs; warm and sparkling with friendship and tiny coal-fires and everlasting hopeful activity.

St Ann’s in the early 1960s was a working-class area of Nottingham, at that time an industrial city. It was the subject of the 1970 book, Poverty : The Forgotten Englishmen. Most of the area was subsequently demolished during a period of slum clearance. A few years earlier, St Anns was the site of a “race riot”.

The bookshop was the meeting place of a small, international revolutionary group, which was also active in local politics. The author was one of those engaged in the hopeful activity mentioned above: a group of young people with a world to win.

“Admirers of Riley’s novels, written under the pen name Carol Lake, will appreciate the clarity, deft characterisation and telling detail of her non-fiction. They will also recognise her signature device of building a comprehensive picture of a community through overlapping narrative fragments that jump back and forth in time.” – Morning Star

About the Author

Sylvia Riley, writing as Carol Lake, was the winner of the 1989 Guardian fiction prize for her short story collection, Rosehill: Portraits of a Midlands City, and she is the author of Switchboard Operators, short fiction of the 1960s (which was made into a TV series The Hello Girls). She lives in Derby.