Welcome to the Cardiff Left Bookclub, founded in 2019, we’re over five years old and finally have a plan for the entire year. There has never been a better time to read books fundamentally concerned with the world we live in and, over the course of 2025, we intend to do just that.

We usually meet upstairs at Tiny Rebel in Cardiff at 19:00 on the first Tuesday of each month, if there’s any change to that you will be the first to know.

2024 has seen instability in both the world and in the publishing industry, books have become much harder to get on short notice and our old model of, generally, having the books for the subsequent meetings voted on at the current one just isn’t sustainable.

This format also allows us to take a deeper dive on each book and a month before each book there will be supplemental reading/watching/listening sent out by mailing and posted on this site.

With consultation of existing bookclub members, and allowing for votes to still take place throughout the year, our list is the following:

January 14th – Caliban Shrieks by Jack Hilton
February 11th – Book to be decided at the January meeting
March 11th – How the Railways Will Fix the Future by Gareth Dennis
April 8th – Book to be decided at the January meeting
May 13th – A Woman’s Battles and Transformations by Édouard Louis
June 10th – Brittle with Relics: A History of Wales by Richard King
July 8th – Feminism is for Everybody by bell hooks
August 12th – Book to be decided at the July meeting
September 9th – Who’s Afraid of Gender? by Judith Butler
October 14th – Book to be decided at the July meeting
November 11th – Rose/House by Arkady Martine
December 9th – The Cricket on the Hearth by Charles Dickens

Our key principles remain the same, we’re aiming for books that are easily readable in a month, with one long read a year, this year that long read is Brittle with Relics. The books that we read should be political, which, roughly, means those concerned with the world in which we live. We also should be reading at least one book about Wales a year, this is a minimum requirement and not a maximum given that all politics is, at the end of the day, local.

Finally, this isn’t a party political bookclub but it is one that believes, deeply, that unless spaces are actively made safe for people as a core principle, we are not fulfilling our basic human obligations.

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