Cross-Genre Reading Group

Welcome to the 'Book Salad'!

Meeting on the last Tuesday of every month (except for this month, when it will meet on 23rd July), the 'Book Salad' will explore a range of stories across multiple genres.

This book group is a salad - to make a salad you put together things you'd like to eat that are each different in some way. Instead of reading one kind of book over the months, we can mix our genres. We will read mostly imaginative fiction, with at least one non-fiction title, and perhaps a graphic novel, and there will be writers from different ages and backgrounds. 

This group is hosted by David, who says 'I choose books that feel imaginative and expressive and that jump out at me. I like variety and I think of books as transport to somewhere interesting and different.'

July's book is: The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again by M. John Harrison

Winner of the Goldsmiths Prize 2020, this is fiction that pushes the boundaries of the novel form.

Shaw had a breakdown, but he’s getting himself back together. He has a single room, a job on a decaying London barge, and an on-off affair with a doctor’s daughter called Victoria, who claims to have seen her first corpse at age thirteen.

It’s not ideal, but it’s a life. Or it would be if Shaw hadn’t got himself involved in a conspiracy theory that, on dark nights by the river, seems less and less theoretical…

Meanwhile, Victoria is up in the Midlands, renovating her dead mother’s house, trying to make new friends. But what, exactly, happened to her mother? Why has the local waitress disappeared into a shallow pool in a field behind the house? And why is the town so obsessed with that old Victorian morality tale, The Water Babies?

Reading Group Structure

Ticketing: Each place is £5, which can be redeemed against a copy of a reading group book.

Frequency: Each reading group will meet once a month, on a set day of the week. You do not need to commit to one group, or every meeting! Just book for those you're interested in each month, and we hope to entice you back for another one.