Book Salad

Welcome to 'Book Salad'.

Meeting on the last Tuesday of every month, our 'Book Salad' group is dedicated to picking up books from different genres and saying, 'Let's try this one'. To make a salad you put together lots of different things you'd like to eat. Instead of reading one kind of book every month, we mix genres. Although we read mostly imaginative fiction, occasionally we pick a non-fiction, even more occasionally a graphic novel, by authors from different ages and backgrounds. This group is hosted by David, a specialist in nothing but willing to read whatever is in front of him.

For our third book of 2025, we are reading 'Submarine', Joe Dunthorne's debut novel, which was made into a popular film directed by Richard Ayoade. Joe is visiting the bookshop on April 5th to talk about his new family memoir, 'Children of Radium'.

'Are we making a bomb?'

'This is a trust exercise, like in drama,' she says.

'Are we making a bomb as a trust exercise?'

Fifteen-year-old Oliver Tate is terrified that his family is falling apart. He fears for his depressed father and is convinced that his mother is having an affair with her capoeira teacher. Deciding that it is down to him alone to save his parents' marriage, Oliver sets out on a campaign to rescue it while also embarking on an even more ambitious goal: to lose his virginity before he's sixteen to the seductive but slightly pyromaniacal Jordana . . .

'The sharpest, funniest, rudest account of a troubled teenager's coming of age since The Catcher in the Rye' - Independent

'A brilliant first novel by a young man of ferocious comic talent' - The Times