- Nigel Slater

Toast: The Story of a Boy's Hunger

By Nigel Slater
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Winner of the British Book Awards Biography of the Year

Nigel Slater’s bestselling memoir of a childhood remembered through food, featuring a new introduction from Elizabeth Day, photographs and an additional final chapter.

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

Author: Nigel Slater
Format: Paperback
Release Date: 15 Aug 2024
Pages: 288
ISBN: 978-1-84115-471-8
Nigel Slater is an award-winning author, journalist and television presenter. He has been the food columnist for the Observer for over thirty years. His bestselling titles include the cookbook classics Appetite, The Kitchen Diaries and the two-volume Tender. His latest non-fiction book is A Thousand Feasts. He has made cookery programmes and documentaries for BBC1, BBC2 and BBC4. His memoir Toast: The Story of a Boy’s Hunger won six major awards and became a film and stage production. His writing has won the James Beard Award, the National Book Award, the Glenfiddich Trophy, the André Simon Memorial Prize, the British Biography of the Year and the Fortnum & Mason Best Food Book. He lives in London. He was awarded an OBE in the New Year Honours in 2020 for services to cookery and literature.

'Acutely observed, poignant and beautifully written…Slater tells his heartbreaking story with great subtlety. The theme of food and love is a fascinating one and I have never seen it better handled' Daily Telegraph -

”'Toast is an astonishing book … [Slater] is a superb writer who can cook sublimely rather than a cook who can write. It is one of the great autobiographies of the past few decades” - The Times

'Few, if any, food writers engender such affection as Nigel Slater. He evokes time, people and place with…unmatched sensuous energy…Extraordinary' Observer -

”'[A] touching odyssey through childhood tastes, treats and tortures” - Sunday Times

”'A talent for prose as simple and pleasurable as his recipes” - Sunday Telegraph

'Moving, funny and finely crafted, it's a real gem' Independent -

'It achieves a remarkable freshness…[and] reveals a gift for doleful, Alan Bennett-like comedy' Guardian -

”'It’s bitter-sweet, it’s a book to be consumed in a single sitting, a book that slips down really nicely. However you want to put it, Toast is delicious” - The Oldie

”'An ingenious and touching treat” - TLS

”'This touching memoir proves [Slater] is more than a cookery writer. Its emotional impact will touch a chord with many” - Sunday Mirror