Five Favourite Non-Fiction From News From Nowhere

In the 'About' section, I've mentioned my favourite two bookshops are Forum Books in Corbridge and News From Nowhere in Liverpool. So, I thought I'd introduce you to both via the things they've offered me over the years.

Read Five Favourite Fiction From Forum Books

News From Nowhere lives on Bold Street in Liverpool. The popular street is home to many of the city's creatives and independents and you can't walk from one end to the other without bumping into someone who once played bass for The La's. As a kid, Bold Street excited me: it was different to the rest of town and seemed almost separate from the mainstream maelstrom of Liverpool's bigger and more bustling thoroughfares. As you get older - and music, ale and sex become part of your existence - Bold Street becomes a rite of passage for those interested in buying records, making new friends and either losing or finding themselves. News From Nowhere sits just beyond the middle of all this and has a shop window so colourful and inviting that it's impossible to pass. It's also impossible to not find something of interest sitting on its packed shelves waiting to illuminate whatever darkness you bury deep inside... NFN offers the power, grace and mercy of knowledge and any reader with an appetite for debate will fall for the place immediately. Just like I did, with a little help from these friends...

1. Liverpool: A City That Dared To Fight by Peter Taaffe & Tony Mulhearn (Augsburg Fortress, 1988) A book that should be on the reading list of every secondary school in Merseyside and beyond, this historical primary source is a document of an explosive time and place in British politics. A book about reactions to events both momentous and monotonous, the book tells one side of a story that happened in Liverpool in the early to mid 1980s. But it tells the unflinching truth by placing the catalytic events into a wider context of the damage a malignant Government can do to people its elected to serve. Less a look at Militant in Liverpool and more a look at Marxism in the UK and beyond, Taffe and the late Mulhearn's straight shooting comes from the hip with an aim that's true.

2. The Last Holiday: A Memoir by Gil Scott Heron (Canongate, 2012) My favourite story in this sideways glance at a life less ordinary is Gil's revelation that tour-mate Stevie Wonder once recognised the author had entered a cavernous Texas stadium from the back of its furthest stand. The rub? Gil was stood hundreds of feet away on the stage at the time. Magic doesn't flow through this non-linear memoir, though, Heron preferring to leave open-ended questions to scattered reminisces that reveal everything if you know where to look. Less an autobiography than a series of wonderfully written vignettes, 'The Last Holiday' will reveal you in its deep, dark and truthful mirror.

3. Wounds: A Memoir Of War & Love by Fergal Keane (William Collins, 2017) Prose this pretty, when writing about atrocity, creates a powerful contradiction for a reader to wrestle with. Journalist Keane is an Irishman with a turn of phrase and a fondness for nostalgia, but that's where the stereotypes end. His ability to see through rose-tinted hand me downs and straight into the eye of the storms at the centre of a civil war gives 'Wounds' its poise and power. A book about the fascination of war, Keane calls upon the beauty and beasts provided by three decades reporting conflict from all over the world for the BBC to deliver a haunting tale that will break the hardest of hearts.

4. Greetings From Bury Park by Sarfraz Manzoor (Vintage, 2007) You don't have to be an acolyte of Bruce Springsteen to love this book, but it helps. Bringing the British Pakistani experience to life, and not flinching at the duality at the heart its singular stories, Manzoor tells his story walking on a dream. The book moves with grace and danger (you can see why movie makers wanted to make it into the Hollywood-sized tale it became in 2019's 'Blinded By The Light'), whilst illuminating lives lived on the fringes. Growing up a Springsteen fan, and the child of immigrants in the latter half of the last century in Luton, the author offers a glimpse of a journey into adulthood when you find a friend who knows what it means to hear the dogs on Main Street howl.

5. Two Tribes: Liverpool, Everton & A City On The Brink by Tony Evans (Bantam Press, 2018) Opening the vein of an era rife for rediscovery outside Liverpool, top Scouse scribe Evans finds the reasons why only the River Mersey ran free when the nation's red hot glare settled on the little city with its back to Westminster throughout a debilitating decade for the rank and file of the working class in the UK. Viewed through the city's obsession with football, 'Two Tribes' tells a wider tale of social and political turmoil away from the terraces of the mid-1980s. No matter if you care little for Liverpool or anything for Everton, the communal agony and ecstasy contained within these pages will stir the souls of anyone who has ever felt the full force of the relentlessness only offered by oppression.

News From Nowhere, 96 Bold Street, Liverpool L1 4HY News From Nowhere Radical & Community Bookshop, Liverpool