Book Salad

Welcome to 'Book Salad'.

Meeting on the last Tuesday of every month, our 'Book Salad' group is dedicated to picking up books from different genres and saying, 'Let's try this one'. To make a salad you put together lots of different things you'd like to eat. Instead of reading one kind of book every month, we mix genres. Although we read mostly imaginative fiction, occasionally we pick a non-fiction, even more occasionally a graphic novel, by authors from different ages and backgrounds.

For our fourth book of 2025, we are reading 'Just The Plague' by Ludmila Ulitskaya. It was a play originally and has been rewritten as a short novel.

Here's the blurb from the publisher: "Rudolf Maier, a young microbiologist working on a plague vaccine, is summoned to Moscow to deliver a progress report to his superiors. Inadvertently, he carries the virus with him from the lab. When his illness is discovered, the state machinery turns with terrifying efficiency, rounding up dozens of people. But for many, the distinction between this enforced, life-sparing isolation and the constant churn of political surveillance and arrests is barely detectable, and personal tragedy is not completely averted. Based on real events in the Stalinist Russia of the 1930s, this gripping novel, written in the late 1980s and rediscovered by the author during lockdown - and never before translated into English - surfaces uncomfortable truths about the current Russian regime and the pandemic crisis."