A Thousand Feasts

From award-winning writer Nigel Slater, comes a new and exquisitely written collection of notes, memoir, stories and small moments of joy.

For years, Nigel Slater has kept notebooks of curiosities and wonderings, penned while at his kitchen table, soaked in a fisherman’s hut in Reykjavik, sitting calmly in a moss garden in Japan or sheltering from a blizzard in a Vienna Konditorei.

These are the small moments, events and happenings that gave pleasure before they disappeared. Miso soup for breakfast, packing a suitcase for a trip and watching a butterfly settle on a carpet, hiding in plain sight. He gives short stories of feasts such as a mango eaten in monsoon rain or a dish of restorative macaroni cheese.

This funny and sharply observed collection of the good bits of life, often things that pass many of us by, is utter joy from beginning to end. Nigel homes in on the scent of a bunch of home-grown sweet peas, the sound of water breathing at night in Japan, the occasional ‘pfuff’ as a tiny avalanche of snow falls from leaves. Moments like these, he hopes, might bring happiness to others too.