Book Salad

Book Salad meets at the end of the month at 6:30pm, usually on a Tuesday, 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 eighth book of 2026, we will read '_The Tremor of Forgery_' by Patricia Highsmith, who is best known for her Ripley books.

About a month ago I read an article by a woman who lived with Patricia Highsmith as a sort of carer shortly before she died.

In it, 'The Tremor of Forgery' was mentioned.

She sounded like a neurotic, tricky person.

It was a short-ish article and I wanted to hear more about her.

So we'll read this book, and get a sense of her through her characters.Here's the blurb:_"_A gripping novel that explores the shifting sands of moral values – is murder still murder when committed in a lawless place?Howard Ingham, an American writer, is in Tunisia working on a screenplay, and feeling stranded.

No one has written to him since he arrived – neither the film director who he is supposed to be meeting in Tunis, nor his lover in New York.The erratic mail eventually brings news of the director’s suicide.

For reasons obscure even to himself, Ingham decides to stay and work on a novel, but a series of events – a hushed-up murder and a vanished corpse – lures him inexorably into the deep, ambivalent shadows of the town; into deceit and away from conventional morality.

Ultimately, what is in question is not justice or truth, but the state of his oddly quiet conscience._"_WHAT WE MIGHT READ NEXTThis list will change.September: '_The Tremor of Forgery'_ by Patricia HighsmithOctober: '_Captains of the Sands'_ by Jorge AmadoNovember: '_The Impostor and Other Stories'_ by Silvina OcampoDecember: '_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)January: '_Zone One'_ by Colson WhiteheadFebruary: _'The Living and The Rest'_ by Jose Eduardo Agualusa ?March: _'I'm Still Here'_ by Marcelo Rubens Paiva ?