The Literary Salon

Soon, the lockdown would start. People would die alone, without any proper ceremony. Charlotte's death would be washed away, the first drop in a downpour. Nobody knew it then but hers would be the last good funeral of the year. It was February 2020, when Ed O'Loughlin heard that Charlotte, a woman he'd known had died, young and before her time. He realised that he was being led to reappraise his l...

While the nights are still long and we’re experiencing some unusually stormy weather, what better way to make the most of this atmosphere than by reading a thriller? On today’s episode of the podcast, we’re featuring Ashley Audrain’s genre-busting The Push. An international bestseller, Ashley has crafted a page-turning psychological drama about a woman whose worst fears come true when she becomes...

Exciting news! In this week’s episode of the podcast we feature rising star Charmaine Wilkerson with her debut novel Black Cake. It’s a truly captivating book about estranged siblings reunited after the death of their mother, encouraged to heal old wounds and share a slice of black Caribbean cake, ‘when the time is right.’ This one will get you right in the feels. And watch out for the upcoming te...

It's LGBTQ+ History Month in the UK! We’re celebrating with the release of an episode featuring Jon Ransom’s debut novel The Whale Tattoo. It’s a fine work of queer literature that we’re excited to share with you.  When a giant sperm whale washes up on the local beach and tells Joe Gunner that death will follow him wherever he goes, Joe knows that the place he needs to go is back home. But his ret...

We have a dazzling memoir featured on the show this week! The Go-Between is a coming-of-age story that shines a light on the life of a young, creative boy growing up in 1980’s Birmingham. Osman Yousefzada grew up on the wrong side of the tracks, in a red-light district amidst divided immigrant communities. Despite these humble beginnings, he is now an internationally celebrated fashion designer wh...

Welcome to our 200th podcast episode! In this episode we're sharing a beautifully written and uniquely told novel about a tragic event in history: the 1966 Aberfan Disaster where a landslide buried a school. William Lavery, a newly certified embalmer, offers up his services to the grieving families. As William soon discovers, giving so much to others can sometimes help us to heal ourselves. This b...

Welcome back listeners to a new year of unmissable books that we can’t wait to share with you. This week we’re bringing you a reading from Irish author Megan Nolan’s sensational novel Acts of Desperation - one of the biggest books of the year!  In Megan’s visceral novel about love, loss and self-effacing obsession, she tells the story of an unnamed narrator’s descent into a toxic relationship with...

We were so happy to launch Amor Towles’ international bestseller A Gentleman in Moscow back in 2017 (you can listen to that event here on the podcast) and we’re delighted to be sharing a reading from his new book The Lincoln Highway in this week’s episode! Already a New York Times bestseller, readers are discovering Amor’s imaginative coming-of-age novel about a young boy in the 1950’s embarking o...

If you enjoy a dark thriller with romance and comedy thrown in, then tune in to this week’s episode featuring a reading by award-winning Finnish author and master of Scandi-noir, Antti Tuomainen. This non-stop novel follows Henri, an insurance mathematician who inherits a theme park. This dose of chaos might be just what his perfectly ordered life is missing - if he can survive the loan sharks, th...

We're delighted to bring you an exclusive reading from the timely and arresting debut novel, In Every Mirror She’s Black. Three Black women are linked in unexpected ways to the same influential white man in Stockholm, as they build their new lives in the most open society, run by the most private people. This multi perspective story is told through the lives of Kemi, a successful marketing exec, B...

Coming to us all the way from South Korea, Lemon, written by multi-award winning author Kwon Yeo-sun, is a short novel translated by Janet Hong. While the plot centres around the tragic and unsolved murder of a beautiful adolescent, Kim Hae-on, the story is about the people in her life who are left to grapple with grief in their own personal ways. Told from three perspectives over the course of tw...

Have we got a chilling book in store for you! In this week’s episode, debut author A.J. West brings us a haunting historical novel entitled The Spirit Engineer. This reading is a particularly special treat as actor Dickon Farmar treats us to a fantastic performance. Belfast, 1914. Two years after the sinking of the Titanic, high society has become obsessed with seances. William Jackson Crawford is...

BIG NEWS about our Autumn Season revealed for your ears only! Listen in to find out who our very exciting guests are and how YOU can get priority tickets before anyone else. We can't wait to be back with you IN PERSON for our UK events this season! Or you can still join us online, of course. Our newsletter subscribers are always first in line for tickets, so sign up *now* (link below) to avoid the...

Sold by her mother. Enslaved in Pompeii's brothel. Determined to survive. Her name is Amara. Welcome to the Wolf Den… We’ve seen this book in just about every bookshop and we’re so glad to be hosting Elodie for an episode of the Literary Salon’s podcast.  By day, Amara walks the streets with the Wolf Den's other downtrodden women, finding comfort in their dreams and the laughter that they share. F...

We're thrilled to bring you this new episode featuring Dinner Party by Sarah Gilmartin - a brilliant coming-of-age page-turner about the complications of sibling relationships and the trauma of family secrets. To mark the anniversary of a death in the family, Kate plans a dinner party - from the fancy table settings to the perfect Baked Alaska waiting in the freezer (yum!). But by the end of the n...

This week’s episode is a delight for anyone who loves to learn about historical events through the lens of fiction. Author Defne Suman brilliantly evokes the sprawling multicultural city of Smyrna through the lives of four families during the early 20th century as the Ottoman Empire is on the brink of collapse.  In the first English edition of The Silence of Scheherazade, the writing is utterly be...

We can’t wait for you to discover Harriet Evans’ gripping novel The Beloved Girls! Catherine, a successful barrister, vanishes from a London train station on the eve of her anniversary. But how and why? The answer lies buried in the past, in the events of the hot, seismic summer of 1989. At Vanes - a mysterious West Country manor house - a young girl, Jane Lestrange, arrives to stay with the gilde...

Welcome back to the podcast! We scour the literary world for the best books to share with you and this episode's reading comes all the way from Accra, Ghana, as Lesley Lokko (supported by a beautiful dawn chorus of birds!) shares her new book, Soul Sisters, with us. It’s a rich, intergenerational tale of love, race, power and secrets that centres on the lifelong friendship between two women: Scott...

If you read one book this summer (although why would you read just one?!), you wouldn't be going wrong by making it The Stranding by Kate Sawyer. In the words of Marian Keyes, it’s 'GORGEOUS and original and captivating', and we love the extract Kate generously shares with us in this podcast episode! Ruth lives in the heart of London. Working, drinking, falling in love: the rhythm of her vivid and...

Georgia Pritchett knows a little something about living with anxiety. From worrying about the monsters under her bed as a child (Were they comfy enough?), to embracing womanhood, (One way of knowing you have crossed from girlhood to womanhood is that men stop furtively masturbating at you from bushes and start shouting things at you from cars. It's a beautiful moment) worry has accompanied her at...

To celebrate Pride Month we wanted to gift you an exclusive release of this special private Salon, with the one and only Garth Greenwell! Garth and Damian talked writing, queerness and 'Cleanness', in this online Salon last year. Garth originally charmed us all at a Salon at The Savoy in 2016 with his debut novel 'What Belongs to You'. He reads his prose as beautifully as he writes it. His subsequ...

After Robbie Fehler’s sudden death, his wife and daughters unite in their struggle to save their pest control company’s finances and the family’s future. To survive, they must overcome a political chasm that threatens a new civil war as the values that once united them now divide the very foundation they’ve built. Through alternating point-of-views, grief and regret gracefully give way to the endu...

A photograph is hung on a gallery wall for the first time since it was taken two decades before. It shows a slaughter house in rural Ireland, a painting of the Virgin Mary on the wall, a meat hook suspended from the ceiling - and, from its sharp point, the lifeless body of a man hanging by his feet. The story of who he is and how he got there casts back into Irish folklore, of widows cursing the l...

In a holiday house by the sea, in a big, messy family, one teenager watches as brothers and sisters, parents and older cousins fill hot days with wine and games and planning a wedding. Enter the Goddens - irresistible, charming, languidly sexy Kit and surly, silent Hugo. Suddenly there's a serpent in this paradise - and the consequences will be devastating. The Great Godden by bestselling author M...

As we continue to highlight young adult fiction books throughout the month of May, we invite you to enjoy a spine tingling reading by international bestselling author Krystal Sutherland. House of Hollow is a dark and twisted modern fairytale about a glamorous trio of otherworldly young women, who share the secret of what really happened to them all those years ago.  Everyone knows who the Hollow s...