So We Live: The Novels of Alexander Baron

Five Leaves launches So We Live: the Novels of Alexander Baron at the festival. Join novelist Anthony Cartwright, historians Sean Longden & Nadia Valman, journalist Andrew Whitehead, literary critic Susie Thomas, and writer Ken Worpole in commemorating one of the most admired novelists and screen-writers of post-war Britain. Born in 1917, Baron  joined the Communist Party as a young man, saw the thick of battle in Sicily and Normandy, and his first novel, From the City, From the Plough (1948), was acclaimed as the definitive novel of the Second World War, the first of a trilogy including There’s No Home (1950) and The Human Kind (1953). There followed a string of novels about working class life in post-war Hackney, including the cult novel The Lowlife (1963), set in 1960s Stoke Newington. The book’s contributors discuss this remarkable writer, his political and literary milieu.