Book Salad

Book Salad meets on the last Tuesday of every month. To make a salad you put together lots of different things you'd like to eat, and we do the same. So every month, instead of reading one kind of book, we mix genres. We tend to read mostly imaginative fiction but occasionally we pick non-fiction, even more occasionally a graphic novel, by authors from different ages and backgrounds.

For our July book, we will read 'Question 7' by Richard Flanagan, which won the Baillie Gifford prize last year. He's the only writer to win both the Booker and the Baillie Gifford prizes. I chose the book after several people mentioned it to me, then hearing the author talking about it in an interview. It sounded unusual and intriguing. - David

The Penguin blurb describes it like this:

From one kiss comes a chain reaction
By way of H. G. Wells and Rebecca West’s affair, through 1930s nuclear physics, to Flanagan’s father working as a slave labourer near Hiroshima, this chain of events culminates in a young man finding himself trapped in a rapid on a wild river, not knowing if he is to live or to die…

"A work of non-fiction…but it has all the complexity and emotional heft of a great novel… Question 7 sets the high-water mark for what the genre [of memoir] can be" - Sunday Times

"There’s so much…in Flanagan’s beautiful, unclassifiable novel-cum-memoir… That it is a masterpiece is without question" - Observer

"Question 7 is the greatest memoir of parents and place I have read - and this is hardly to touch on its originality. I was amazed by its intense moral and emotional rigour, its power of compassion, the strength and beauty of the prose. I would take it up, read a page, sometimes just a paragraph, and find I had to set it down, dazed, to think about every word and idea before I could even begin to go on. Devastating and beautiful, mighty in its rage and tenderness: his most momentous book yet" - Laura Cumming, author of Thunderclap