With its radical reputation, Five Leaves is a bookshop beloved by you Notts lot. But did you know that, alongside stocking all the best and rarest titles, the store hosts a regular book club? With recent titles including The Book of Form and Emptiness and Elena Knows, this month you can look forward to diving into Selby Wynn Schwartz’s After Sappho - the novel which reimagines the stories of feminists, artists, writers and sapphics from the 19th and 20th century. Before the event on Thursday 27 October, we catch up with Five Leaves’ Ross Bradshaw and Jane Anger to learn more…
Born from popular demand, the Five Leaves book club has been running since 2017. A place to discuss and share ideas, the group is a non-committal gathering for book lovers, with some participants coming semi-regularly and others “once in a lifetime”, according to the proprietor of Five Leaves, Ross Bradshaw. “We don’t ask for regular commitment, which makes it easier,” he says, with only a few things being asked of the attendees; to read the book of the month, and to allow for everyone to have their say. “People can be very passionate about books they like and dislike, or even just a passage in a book,” hence why it’s so important to let others speak.
Each month’s pick is fairly random, Ross tells me. “We’ve had one or two people saying if we discuss a particular book they will come along for that event, and we tend to do that. Other times it's chosen by a member of the team here or one of the semi-regulars. The book has to be in print and in paperback, but we don't mind if people borrow it from a friend or a library, they don't have to buy it here.”
This month, the book club’s pick is After Sappho, chosen by members and due to be introduced by Jane Anger - founder of Feminist Book Fortnight, the national celebration of feminist books co-ordinated by Five Leaves. “I’m just a few chapters into After Sappho at the moment,” Jane says, “but it’s a book about lesbians through time, with a sapphic-centred gaze! It’s a poetically-written, often hilarious riff on how lesbians have found ways to survive, pushed boundaries, reinvented themselves after escaping the abuses of patriarchal families and societies. There are (still) very few books published about the lesbian experience, fiction or non-fiction, so this book is important for that reason.”
A lot of readers like to turn private enjoyment into public engagement. Bookshops are perfect places to do that
Part of a growing movement of titles written from the female gaze, After Sappho is the ideal book for our current literary zeitgeist. “There has indeed been a refocusing of gaze and politics, whatever the mainstream media says. Young women have become really interested in feminist issues and particularly in history,” Jane says. “We have lots of women coming into the shop wanting to read books from authors like Audre Lorde, bell hooks and many more. Thanks to movements like #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, publishers have realised, not before time, that more diversity is something readers want and retellings and re-imaginings of history, like After Sappho, are a part of that and are a powerful way of refocusing away from the patriarchal gaze.”
Happening on Thursday 27 October, Five Leaves welcomes any new attendees to come along. “A lot of readers like to turn private enjoyment and thought into public engagement,” Ross finishes by saying, “and bookshops and libraries are perfect places to do that. Plus, they’re a way of helping the less confident reader to get on with books. You don't have to be hugely well-read to discuss a book you have feelings about.”
Five Leaves Book Group on After Sappho is taking place on Thursday 27 October
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