Toast: The Story of a Boy's Hunger

‘Toast’ is top food writer Nigel Slater’s eat-and-tell autobiography. Detailing all the food, recipes and cooking that have marked his passage from greedy schoolboy to great food writer, this is also a catalogue of how the British have eaten over the last three decades.

Whether relating his mother’s ritual burning of the toast, his father’s dreaded Boxing Day stew or such culinary highlights of the day as Arctic Roll and Grilled Grapefruit (then considered something of a status symbol in Wolverhampton), this incredibly moving and deliciously evocative memoir of childhood, adolescence and sexual awakening vividly recreates daily life in sixties and seventies suburban England.

‘Wonderful, precise, extraordinary’Guardian

‘Toast connects emotions, memory and taste buds. Genius’Sunday Times

‘You read this remarkable memoir partly cringing, partly marvelling at Slater’s hallucinogenic retrieval of times past. He is the Proust of the Nesquik era’ Independent

‘Acutely observed, poignant and beautifully written … Slater tells his heartbreaking story with great subtlety’ Daily Telegraph