While the book trade debates whether the day of the celebrity biography has finally come to an end, some commercial publishers have started noticing that left-wing books sell well, with Allen Lane publishing The Establishment by Owen Jones.

This book topped the Christmas best-seller charts at Nottingham’s Five Leaves Bookshop and at News from Nowhere in Liverpool, coming second at Housmans in London only to its own Peace Diary. Allen Lane also published Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything, a book that places the blame for climate change right where it belongs — on capitalism.

At Five Leaves Bookshop, which has completed its first full year of trading, the only novel in the 15 best-sellers in December was John Harvey’s Darkness, Darkness, set during the miners’ strike, and two others on it were related to that defining part of our common history.

We’re pleased with our first 12 months but equally so that News from Nowhere celebrated their 40th birthday with a record year.

Many people prefer to “shop with the real Amazons” at this women-run bookshop.

It, along with London’s Gay’s the Word and Housmans, is positively venerable while Wordpower in Edinburgh and the two anarchist distributors Active and AK have left their teenage years but there is a range of younger groups in the Alliance of Radical Booksellers sprinkled around the country.

AK Distribution’s best-sellers include books on feminism and economics and in Scotland Wordpower had good sales for anything related to the referendum.

Another trend is the renewed interest in “people’s history.” In Nottingham Chris Richardson’s City of Light, a book about radical life in 1844, sold well while Spokesman Books and Merlin Press offer a different history of World War I than that pushed by our government.

Strong sales of the pamphlet on WWI No Glory reveal that people will read pamphlets if they are displayed — something commercial bookshops are loathe to do. Five Leaves is a publisher turned bookseller, enabling us to return to being a pamphleteer.

Our first two titles are a forgotten essay by Edward Said on Jerusalem and a short biography of the communist Doctor Who writer Malcolm Hulke, whose existence we came across in the Morning Star.

Radical bookshops are not the only side of the business with claims to venerability. Merlin will shortly be 60 and its global book marketing division represents many publishers from home and abroad, while the main trade distributor of radical publishers, Central Books, started in 1939.

Nobody rests on their laurels though. Russell Press — set up in the heady days of 1968 — has been at the forefront of digital printing, responding to more and more groups using this affordable technology to publish local and people’s histories.

There’s a growing number of prizes and fairs reflecting this expansion. The Bread and Roses Award for Radical Publishing, now in its fourth year, will this year be funded by the General Federation of Trade Unions while in Nottingham the mini-festival of the same name was established in November with trade union support. The number of local anarchist bookfairs continues to grow, while the London Radical Bookfair at the Bishopsgate Institute on May 9 is the major date for the whole radical book trade to come together.

So what are the big radical titles going to be in 2015? Publishers are slow to catch up on the new interest in feminism from young women but an exception is the new short book We Should All Be Feminists by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (pictured left above with Caroline Lucas).

Honourable Friends?, Green MP Caroline Lucas’s account of her work inside and outside Parliament should get a lot of attention when it comes out in March while Paul Mason’s Post-Capitalism will be a summer best-seller.

Left-wing publisher Pluto has David Rosenberg’s Rebel Footprints, a walking guide to the capital for lefties — the author got to know the byways of London as Central Books’s van driver — while the Verso paperback of A Philosophy of Walking by Frederic Gros will enable us to think about walking without actually doing it.

And Five Leaves? Well, there is the small matter of an election. One of our big books in 2014 was Look Back In Anger, Harry Paterson writing on Nottinghamshire during the miners’ strike where, among other things, he focused his attention on the scab “union” UDM. In 2015 we are letting him loose on Ukip, with We Need to Talk About Nigel.

We could hardly not.