Red Puffin

A bit of historical fiction, about young love and medieval antisemitism, published on Bounds Green Book Writers.

Photo by Lisa Forkner on Unsplash

Kohei Saito, Slow Down. How Degrowth Communism Can Save the Earth, trans. Brian Bergstrom, (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, London 2024), xvi, 264pp.

Saito attempts to argue for a ‘degrowth communism’, but misunderstands Marx and sees no revolutionary role for the working class, I argue for Counterfire.

The centrality of anti-imperialism to socialism and class struggle has been disputed since before the First World War, but clarity on this issue remains vital, I argue for Counterfire.

My article on how the Albigensian crusade supplied a template for modern oppression, and a podcast talking about all things Cathar, both for Jacobin.

My review of a study of the last witchcraft executions in England, in Bideford, a town I know well. It shows the roots of witch-panics in conflicts fuelled by capitalism and the state and was deeply fascinating. Recommended!

‘Another writer who knows how to make far-future, spacefaring stories leap from the page is Elaine Graham-Leigh, whose glitteringly good debut novel The Caduca (Conrad Press, £9.99) is an action-packed story about neocolonialism, the blood-soaked cynicism of liberal intervention and a resistance movement divorced from the people and trapped in a cycle of pointless violence and self-indulgent martyrdom.’

https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/c/sci-fi-and-fantasy-june-21-2021

Sean Sheehan at The Fantasy Hive says that it ‘spins an engaging tale that resonates with contemporary issues around legacies of colonialism, resistance and the treachery of politicos’, while David Gee says ‘there are echoes of Frank Herbert’s magisterial Dune saga, which sets Graham-Leigh up there with the giants of the genre.’

Thanks, both!

A fun conversation with Vince Stevenson of @Boomersonbooks, ranging from writing ‘ticks’ to AIs joining trade unions!

A fantasic review of The Caduca from Richard Allday on Counterfire.

Above all, Graham-Leigh has written a book that stands with the unremarked, the overlooked, the dispossessed, whose usual fate is to be written out of history yet whose labour is indispensable.

See the review here.

I was recently interviewed about The Caduca by Francis Sealey of Enfield Climate Action Forum, Enfield Voices and GlobalNet21 (he has many hats). It was so much fun to talk in-depth about the book, even if some of the questions were distinctly tricky!