Book Salad

Book Salad meets on the last Tuesday of every month, at 6:30pm, and you're very welcome to join us. To make a salad you put together different things you'd like to eat, and we do the same with reading. We try all kinds of books, by all kinds of people. We limit numbers to fifteen attendees and it's very friendly and informal.

For our fourth book of 2026, we will read 'Wavewalker' by Suzanne Heywood, a memoir of her childhood at sea. The book's been really popular, and tells an unusual story that seems to resonate with just about everyone I've spoken to who's read it. 

One day when she was six or seven years old, Suzanne Heywood's father announced that the family would sail around the world. For three years, he said. Father, mother, Suzanne and her little brother. The voyage would end up lasting about ten years. 

When 'Wavewalker' was published in 2023, I read an excerpt from it in a newspaper that had a strong effect on me as I imagined how powerless a child would feel in her situation.

Here's the blurb:

Wavewalker by Suzanne Heywood

"Aged just seven, Suzanne Heywood set sail with her parents and brother on a three-year voyage around the world. What followed turned instead into a decade-long way of life, through storms, shipwrecks, reefs and isolation, with little formal schooling. No one else knew where they were most of the time and no state showed any interest in what was happening to the children.

Suzanne fought her parents, longing to return to England and to education and stability. This memoir covers her astonishing upbringing, a survival story of a child deprived of safety, friendships, schooling and occasionally drinking water… At seventeen Suzanne earned an interview at Oxford University and returned to the UK.

From the bestselling author of What Does Jeremy Think?, Wavewalker is the incredible true story of how the adventure of a lifetime became one child’s worst nightmare – and how her determination to educate herself enabled her to escape."

‘A classic memoir of childhood. This is a book that every parent should read to consider the consequences of their midlife crises, and every child should read to learn how to deal with impossible mums and dads, as well as boils and barnacles’ Mail on Sunday 5*

‘An electrifying story about an extraordinary childhood, and Heywood tells it with remarkable clarity and assurance . . . an engrossing book that pitches the reader into the highs and lows of a young life spent in the “Wavewalker School of the Sea”’TLS

What we might read next

I am sometimes asked for a provisional reading list for the rest of our year, so here it is. I'll try to stick to it but there may be changes if something exciting comes along:

May: 'The Go-Between' by L.P. Hartley

June: 'Captains of the Sands' by Jorge Amado

July: 'The Impostor and Other Stories' by Silvina Ocampo

August: 'The Man Who Was Thursday' by G.K. Chesterton

September: 'The Sundial' by Shirley Jackson

October: 'The Blizzard' by Vladimir Sorokin

November: 'The Bean Trees' by Barbara Kingsolver

December: 'A Chess Story' by Stefan Zweig (We don't meet in December but this is the short book I've decided I'll be reading)