Rebecca May Johnson for Small Fires

Small Fires is the thrillingly original book that is shaking up the food writing scene and challenging how we think about cooking and the kitchen.

Come along to hear the deeply insightful Rebecca May Johnson discuss her kitchen epic: Small Fires. We are thrilled to welcome her to the bookshop having been intrigued and excited by her writing since the book first arrived.

Rebecca is a writer and researcher, a gardener and a cook, and this book is steeped in her connection to, and love of, culinary practice. It weaves theory, memoir, advice, and politics in a fresh and original way that revitalised how you approach cooking. She's written essays, reviews and nonfiction for Granta, Times Literary Supplement, and Daunt Books Publishing, among others.

Why do we cook? Is it just to feed ourselves and others? Or is there something more revolutionary going on?

In Small Fires, Rebecca reinvents cooking - that simple act of rolling up our sleeves, wielding a knife, spattering red hot sauce on our books - as a way of experiencing ourselves and the world.

This joyful, revelatory work of memory and meditation both complicates and electrifies life in the kitchen. It shows us the radical potential of the thing we do every day: the power of small fires burning everywhere.

It was our Art Buyer Rafe's favourite title of the year: "Cookery as work, as practice, as translation; Small Fires dissects the act of transfiguration that is the making of food with a depth of thought that resonates through every question raised and theory provided. Rebecca May Johnson pulls the reader into her kitchen (read: workshop) and questions what it is to cook."