At the moment the group continues to meet via Zoom and is open to all members. We’ll keep members posted about future events.

The Book Club is currently reading novels by immigrants and visitors to Britain during 1950s and 60s. It is interesting how the writers’ exploration of class, culture and individual identity are themes that resonate today.

For example, the experiences of the characters in Sam Selvon’s ‘The Lonely Londoners’ foreshadow the dilemmas of the Windrush Generation and the enduring legacy of the ‘Hostile Environment’. As an English intellectual comments in the Egyptian writer Waguih Ghali’s ‘Beer in the Snooker Club’: ‘We English never break the law, it’s so malleable in our capable hands.’

There is resilience and hope too. Here’s Alexander Baron’s narrator in ‘The Lowlife’ celebrating a group of children playing on a Hackney street. ‘Today it was a proper little United Nations. Here were black kids, Yiddisher kids, Cypriot kids and fair-haired little Saxons…They call themselves ‘gangs’ but ‘tribes’ would be a better word, little self-governing human tribes.’

Our latest book is Frantz Fanon’s classic ‘The Wretched of the Earth’. This is a searing analysis of the impact of colonialism by the author of ‘Black Skin White Masks’. Written at the height of the Algerian war for independence from French colonial rule, the text considers the roles played by class, race, national culture and violence in the struggle for freedom. It has been an inspiration for anti-colonial struggles ever since.

You can find out more about The Book Group by contacting them here.