#BlogTour-‘Leaves’ by John Simmons

About the book…

Ophelia Street, 1970. A street like any other, a community that lives and breathes together as people struggle with their commitments and pursue their dreams.

It is a world we recognise, a world where class and gender divide, where set roles are acknowledged. But what happens when individuals step outside those roles, when they secretly covet, express desire, pursue ambitions even harm and destroy?

An observer in the midst of Ophelia Street watches, writes, imagines, remembers, charting the lives and loves of his neighbours over the course of four seasons. And we see the flimsily disguised underbelly of urban life revealed in all its challenging glory.

As the leaves turn from vibrant green to vivid gold, so lives turn and change too, laying bare the truth of the community. Perhaps, ultimately, we all exist on Ophelia Street.

My thanks to Kelly at Love Books Group Tours for the invite and Urbane Publications for my beautiful paperback review copy!

‘Leaves’ is available in ebook and paperback formats from all good booksellers.

This book is split into 5 parts-all the seasons plus a New Year section-and focuses on Ophelia Street in 1970’s London.

The principle narrator is a jpurnalist with a sociology degree who has moved here to start a new postion on a local paper. Instead, he finds himself so fascinated by the minutiae of life under his nose that he begins logging their comings and goings and various interactions.

It makes the reader feel like a voyeur as he makes you feel as if you are standing there, right next to him, twitching the net curtains. It is an uncomfortable read in many ways as all the characters are immensely unlikeable-from factory manager Gerald and his sister Selene who share a house and a very odd relationship,to Keith and Brenda who are a married couple, one black, one Irish. I found it hard to stop reading despite my reluctancer to do so-the prose is very, very rich to the point that it took me a great deal longer to read this 205 page novel than one twice its length.

I wanted to find out how it ended, and what happened to the families and

the answer is, as in real life, very little . ‘Leaves’ is a book where the most apparent changes happen with the season changes whilst the people there stagnate. The things that bring them together are very uncomfortable to the modern reader-racism, the ‘Not In My Back Yard Brigade’ who do not want a hostel for released prisoners opening in their street.

Beginning with an act of violence under the cover of darkness, I felt it set the tone for the whole novel and I genuinely would find it hard to rate . I think that people who enjoy literary fiction would appreciate it more than myself and find more which resonates with them. As a reader, I found it an exercise in pretentious voyerurism but again, it is one reader’s perception of a novel which may be the total antithesis of the majority of readers.

If you are interested in character studies and microscopic viewpoints then this would be a great book for you. ‘Leaves’ is a re-issued and revised book so despite looking back 40 years, it is actually a debut so straddles some decades and does so awkwardly.

I remain grateful to the author and the publishers for letting me read ‘Leaves’, I feel that it’s central concept, however, has fallen on less sophisticated ears than those it was intended for.

About the author…

‘I’m a writer and consultant with a background in the world of identity and branding. I was a director of Interbrand until 2003 when I co-founded 26, the writers’ group, and Dark Angels that runs residential writing courses in remote retreats. These came out of a number of books on the relationship between language and identity, including “The Dark Angels Trilogy” – We, Me, Them & It, The Invisible Grail and Dark Angels.

In recent times I have also written fiction, first ‘Leaves’ published in 2015, ‘Spanish Crossings‘ in 2017, with ‘The Good Messenger‘ in autumn 2018. These books are all published by Urbane.’

Links-https://www.dark-angels.org.uk/2017/05/25/conversation-john-simmons-rowena-roberts/

https://urbanepublications.com/

Twitter @JNSim

@urbanebooks