Five Leaves Publications: 28 books

This book is for all readers of crime fiction. Dividing Britain and Ireland into thirteen regions, the author describes the work of contemporary and historic crime writers and their novels where the setting of the novel is crucial, giving the story context and local relevance.

Enthusiasts call Harry Gysel a psychic. To others he is a fraud, a meddler in the occult. When he appears to predict the death of a woman in the audience of one of his shows and that woman is subsequently found murdered, Harry becomes an instant celebrity. But Chief Inspector Morgan isn’t so easily convinced.

In 1849, several hundred thousand Americans and Europeans began streaming across ‘The Great American Desert’ bound for the gold fields of California. Their dream was to strike it rich, but if the Gold Rush epitomizes the American Dream, their trek through the wilderness became the worst of nightmares....

London Fictions is a book about London, real and imagined. Two dozen contemporary writers, from Cathi Unsworth to Courttia Newland, reflect on some of the novelists and the novels that have helped define the modern city, from George Gissing to Zadie Smith, Hangover Square to Brick Lane. It is a book...

Harry Preston says goodbye to the provinces and comes to London looking for life and adventure. It is the mid50s and he soon finds himself in the impoverished and slightly seedy world of the emerging Beat Generation.

Jack Keyse is looking for the truth about what happened to his vanished lover. He works at a maximum security asylum, and he uses his professional contacts to get close to those who might be responsible. At the same time he seeks forgetfulness in the chaos of his dissolute life. He comes to discover...

Nineteen Fortyeight is a comic versenovel, audaciously rewriting George Orwell’s Nineteen Eightyfour in Pushkin sonnets. Set during the 1948 London Olympics, it offers a radically alternative history of the Cold War, in which Britain has a LabourCommunist coalition government, the Royal Family have fled to Rhodesia and the US threatens to impose an economic blockade on Britain.

That blurred, foggy frame of the security video has become engraved on the public conscience. The video shows one of the boys holding James Bulger’s hand as the other boy moves away, a little ahead of them. We know that the two boys are taking James away from his mother and safety. If we are ever...

This essay extends antiracist debates by taking a close look at some of the possible reasons for the murder of Stephen Lawrence. His murder was a part of the rise of extremely violent racism in Britain (particularly in southeast London) and in Europe over the preceding decade. The neglected links...

Ship of Fools comprises twenty short stories, one for each year the author worked in the mental health system. These stories are fiction, but they are based on the real world of psychiatry and maximum security institutions. Written from the point of view of a staff member, the author lifts the lid...

Mark Trace shows a remarkable talent for literary forgery. A gap year in Paris sees his skill exploited by a manuscript dealer. Mark fetches up in London, working at one of the UK's oldest literary magazines. That's when the trouble really starts. Hemingway and Graham Greene are only the beginning....

It is summer... a heat wave... tense, uneasy days in the city. There are ominous signs of political turbulence in the dying years of the twentieth century. Welfare benefits are under attack, but women are fighting back, using unorthodox weapons. Lynn Byers does not accept the government's demand for...

A frightened phone call from her young daughter sends Jenny Carter into the darkness of Quarry Woods, seventeen years after she swore she’d never return. What she finds there triggers a journey back to a horrific event in her own childhood – an event which now threatens the present.

Colin Ward was an anarchist, a writer, an educator and an environmentalist. His books include "Anarchy in Action" and many others, primarily on social history, childhood, housing and the informal landscape. His wideranging interests included New Towns, allotments, transport and the British holiday...