Cardiff’s longest running book club
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13 Jan 2026 – Leonard and Hungry Paul – Ronan Hession
Leonard and Hungry Paul is a quietly radical, deeply humane, and disarmingly funny novel. It is about choosing kindness in a world that prizes noise. Ronan Hession writes with extraordinary gentleness. He invites us into the lives of two men. Their decency becomes an act of quiet resistance. The novel does not chase drama. Its…
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10 Feb 2026 – Morgan Is My Name – Sophie Keetch (Author in attendance)
A bold, reimagined Arthurian tale reclaiming Morgan as a complex and powerful woman. Sophie Keetch challenges myth, history, and gendered storytelling with confidence and emotional depth. The author will be joining us. This promises a rich discussion about power and prophecy. We will explore who gets to shape the stories we inherit. Historical fiction that…
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10 Mar 2026 – Tu Hwnt – Short story collection
Tu Hwnt — meaning ‘beyond’ — is a collection of short stories rooted in Wales and reaching outward. These are stories of edges and in‑between spaces, written with care and ambition. Short stories reward close reading and shared discussion, making this an ideal CardiffRead pick. Expect multiple voices, sharp insights, and moments of quiet brilliance.…
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14 April 2026 – Super-Infinite – Katherine Rundell
Part biography, part intellectual adventure, Super-Infinite is Katherine Rundell’s exhilarating exploration of the life and mind of John Donne. Rundell does not follow a conventional cradle-to-grave account. Instead, she uses Donne as a jumping-off point to explore poetry, science, theology, and love. She also delves into the sheer strangeness of being alive. Written with wit…
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12 May 2026 – I Can Hear the Cuckoo – Kiran Sidhu
I Can Hear the Cuckoo is a quietly luminous novel. It explores themes of grief, solitude, and the natural world. Kiran Sidhu writes with great attentiveness, allowing landscape, seasons and daily rituals to shape the emotional life of the story. At its heart, this is a novel about withdrawal and return. It explores what happens…
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9 June 2026 – James – Percival Everett
In James, Percival Everett reclaims a classic piece of American literature. He does this by retelling The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim. The result is sharp, unsettling and often darkly funny. Everett exposes the moral blind spots of the original text, using wit and satire to interrogate race, language and power.…
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14 July 2026 – Ishmael – Daniel Quinn
Ishmael is a novel that has quietly changed the way many readers think about civilisation. It has influenced their views on progress and humanity’s relationship with the natural world. Framed as a series of conversations, it poses deceptively simple questions with far-reaching implications. Daniel Quinn challenges the stories modern societies tell themselves about dominance, growth…
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11 Aug 2026 – The Ministry of Time – Kaliane Bradley
The Ministry of Time is a bold, genre-defying novel that blends speculative fiction, romance and political satire. At its centre is a government programme. It brings people from the past into the present. These actions have unexpected emotional consequences. Kaliane Bradley uses the framework of time travel to explore love, power, bureaucracy and historical responsibility.…
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8 Sept 2026 – Endling – Maria Reva
Endling is a darkly comic, politically sharp novel that explores extinction, nationalism and survival in unsettling ways. Maria Reva’s writing is bold, inventive and unafraid to take risks. The novel mixes satire with moments of real emotional weight. It examines what societies choose to protect. It also considers what they are willing to sacrifice. Reva’s…
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13 Oct 2026 – Monstrilio – Gerardo Sámano Córdova
Monstrilio is a novel about grief that takes an unexpected and unsettling form. Blending elements of horror with emotional realism, it explores how love persists after devastating loss. The book asks difficult questions about attachment, transformation and the boundaries of care. Its strangeness is purposeful, giving shape to emotions that resist easy explanation. Rather than…
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10 Nov 2026 – If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller – Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller is a playful, challenging classic about the act of reading itself. Structured as a series of interrupted beginnings, it constantly resets expectations. The novel invites readers to consider why they read, how stories work and what it means to be absorbed by a book. It is…
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8 Dec 2026 – Murder at Christmas – G B Rubin
To close the year, Murder at Christmas offers a seasonal atmosphere with a sharp edge. Snow, secrets and social tension combine in a classic festive mystery setting. This is a book that understands the pleasures of the genre while still offering thoughtful characterisation and intrigue. Perfect for December reading, it balances escapism with enough substance…
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14th January 2025 – Sarn Helen by Tom Bullough
Wales is the measure of all things in this time-shifting story of ecological change. Just as the first lockdown was beginning to lift in late summer 2020, Tom Bullough set out to walk Sarn Helen, the Roman road that once cut through Wales from Neath in the south to Caerhun in the north. It still…
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11th February 2025 – Assembly by Natasha Brown
Here is a short sharp shock of a novel about the kind of person the UK government’s recent commission on race would have wanted to profile in their report. Natasha Brown’s virtuosic debut follows a British woman who is preparing to attend a party, and who is musing about her life and her place in…
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11th March 2025 – brother. do. you. love. me. by Manni Coe and Reuben Coe
They were just five words, separated by four tiny full stops and four spaces: “brother. do. you. love. me.” But when, in November 2020, that text from Reuben Coe, who was alone in his room in a care home in Dorset, arrived on the phone of his brother Manni in Andalusia there was little else…
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8th April 2025 – The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells
“It’s worse, much worse, than you think.” When Wallace-Wells published this magazine article in July 2017, little would he have known it would become the New York magazine’s most read piece. This book, with the same title, is the longplay offspring, with over a 100 pages of footnotes, it’s clearly and importantly a very well…
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13th May 2025 – Wythnos yng Nghymru Fydd | A Week in Future Wales by Islwyn Ffowc Elis
Bydd honna meet-up dwyieithog, felly darllenwch pa fersiyn/au bynnag sydd orau gennych | This will be a bilingual meet-up so please read the English or Welsh version … or both! ***SAESNEG ISOD | ENGLISH BELOW*** Nofel ffuglen chwedlonol a wyddonol gan Islwyn Ffowc Elis a gyhoeddwyd gan Plaid Cymru yn 1957 yw Wythnos yng Nghymru…
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10th June 2025 – Gliff by Ali Smith
The first of two new interconnected novels from bestselling, Booker Prize-shortlisted author Ali Smith. A characteristically oblique and audacious tour de force revolving loosely around the concept of resistance in a dystopian society. This is the logical evolution of the world Smith presented in the seasonal quartet: of brutal detention centres in which a for-profit…
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8th July 2025 – The Silence Project by Carole Hailey – AUTHOR IN ATTENDANCE
A blazing fictional dystopia presented as memoir, Hailey’s masterly novel revolves around the relationship between teenage Emilia and her mother Rachel, whose decision to suddenly stop speaking kickstarts an all-encompassing global ‘event’. Inspired by Rachel’s example, other women join her and together they build the Community. Eight years later, Rachel and thousands of her followers…
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12th August 2025 – On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong
A Vietnamese-American poet’s debut mines his extraordinary family story with passion and beauty This is a letter from a son to a mother who can’t read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family’s history that began before he was born. It tells of Vietnam, of the…
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9th September 2025 – Local Fires by Joshua Jones (Author in Attendance)
Local Fires sees debut writer Joshua Jones turn his acute focus to his birthplace of Llanelli, South Wales. Sardonic and melancholic, joyful and grieving, these multifaceted stories are set in a small town. However, they reach far beyond their locality. Jones has crafted a collection versatile in theme and observation. It spans topics from the inertia…
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14th October 2025 – The Small Hand by Susan Hill
Robert Aickman, perhaps the greatest English writer of supernatural fiction, more than once expressed the view that the ghost story as a form was analogous to poetry. What he was getting at is that it is delicate, shaded, requires a deal of sensitivity from the writer, and has many competing elements that have to be…
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11th November 2025 – Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome
An ancient river. The journey upstream of some impressionable young men into a mysterious, challenging interior. An inevitable reckoning at the source. Finally, the terrible return to reality. Here, surely, is pre-Edwardian English fiction at its classic finest. But this is not Heart of Darkness, and the river is not the Congo. Actually, it’s the Thames,…
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9th December 2025 – Murder Under the Mistletoe by The Reverend Richard Coles
It’s that time of year again… Gaudy jumpers and garish paper enwrap us and our Secret Santa gifts at the annual Christmas get together. The rules are simple: Then, on the night, we’ll pop all the gifts in Santa’s sack. Everyone gets to pick a great new read. We’ll review those in the January 2026…
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10th December 2024 – And So This Is Christmas by Brian Bilston
It’s that time of year again . . . With his signature wit, Brian Bilston returns with And So This is Christmas, fifty-one poems in celebration of the festive season: from bizarre family traditions to the office Christmas party; from voting day for turkeys to the impossible art of gift-giving. So hang your stockings, grab your…
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