Lauren St John, author of  Rainbow's End, reflects on her visit to LAURA'S BOOK GROUP, Edinburgh - winners of the Penguin/Orange Readers' Group Prize 2008

It was at the end of a long and fairly magical evening, when they presented me with a CD with a Penguin-inspired cover and said, “This is the soundtrack of your childhood,” that I made up my mind that Laura’s Group must surely be the most worthy ever winners of the Penguin Orange Broadband Readers’ Group Prize.

A compilation which includes “Rhodesians Never Die”, Kenny Rogers’ “Ruby Don’t Take Your Love to Town”, Olivia Newton-John’s “Hopelessly Devoted to You” and the Bellamy Brothers’ “If I Said You Had a Beautiful Body Would You Hold it Against Me” might not be everybody’s idea of musical perfection, but as a teenager growing up in the 70s it was mine. When I was writing my African memoir, Rainbow’s End, it was those songs and others that played over and over in my head, providing me with an emotional stepping-stone to the past. That a group of strangers, nearly three decades and many thousands of miles removed from my homeland, not only recognized that but had taken the time and trouble to record that music for posterity, was moving beyond words.

But it turned out that the CD was only one highlight in the unforgettable evening I spent with the Edinburgh-based Laura’s Book Group. From the moment I walked into a backroom in the historic Hawes Inn (featured in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped and in the movie version of The 39 Steps) to find a table decorated with assorted toy wild animals and a bright pink Stetson, I had a feeling I was in for a good time. For a start, Laura (the owner of the Stetson), an ebullient woman whose open friendliness defines her book group, was wearing a Dolly Parton T-shirt. That set us off on an excited debate about Dolly, the “Live Experience,” and from then on I felt right at home.

Looking around at the group, joshing each other or listening intently to each other with the easygoing camaraderie and respect of people who not only like each other, but have formed deep and lasting friendships through a shared passion, it’s hard to believe that Laura’s biggest fear when starting the book group was that no one would come. Creating a book group had been her dream more or less since childhood when she used to pretend she ran a library while her sister, Catriona, had a bank. “She’d take three pence off you and wouldn’t refund it,” Laura says with a laugh.

Her friend, Lucy, was the catalyst for the grown-up Laura’s book group. She was forever asking if Laura had done anything about it. They decided that the worst that could happen is that only two people would come – “the smallest definition of a group!”

In November 2006 the pair launched Laura’s Book Group, asking friends and colleagues if they’d like to read and discuss The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. “Our enthusiasm carried us along.”

In no time at all the group had grown to 13 in Scotland, with five long distance members from as far afield as Oban, Manchester and the Lake District who attend when they can and write reviews when they can’t. They’re a multi-national (Scottish, English, Irish, Canadian and American) group from a wide variety of backgrounds, their professions ranging from NHS Pharmacist and Hotel Manger to full-time mums and Spiritual Advisor. As a consequence, their book debates are intelligent, passionate and funny. Not surprisingly there is a waiting list of people desperate to become members.

What really sets the group apart though is their themed monthly meetings and social events. They enjoy meals featured in their books of the month (they’ve tucked into three-course Cambodian, Russian, Thai and Hawaiian dinners) or visit the location (for The 39 Steps, their book club meeting was at the Hawes Inn) or their own version of a Rabbie Burns night, their American member singing a Burns poem to the theme of an American marching band. For Michel Faber’s hitchhiker horror, Under the Skin, they dined on eyeball gobstoppers, and it was chocolate fountains and champagne for Jeanette Winterson's erotic novel, Written on the Body,

When they read Geoff Ryman's Cambodia-set The King's Last Song, they ordered deep-fried crickets over the internet and everyone dutifully tried them. “They tasted like really nasty, additive flavoured bacon chips, with crispy bits,” laughs Laura.

Their Rainbow’s End-themed food was biltong and carrot cake, both of which we used to make on the farm when I was a child, and a delicious, hand made Bumi Cheese Cake, which they’d made from a recipe in the book. I ate it while a slide show they’d assembled, featuring dozens of cultural references from my childhood (Ian Smith, Rhodesian Ridgebacks, the movie Grease, warthogs, Victoria Falls and my favourite cereal, Cerelac, to name just a few), clicked past in the background.

The combination of the slide show, the Bumi Cheese Cake, the intense debate about some of the controversial themes of the book, and several funny questions about my family and mad childhood pets, made it less a walk down memory lane for me than like falling headfirst through the looking glass of my Zimbabwean youth. It was, to say the least, touching.

At their annual AGM, the book group present Penguin book cover-styled certificates to the winners of the Stephen Fry Award for the most witty comments or the Willy Wonka Award for the most enthusiastic member, among others.  In their entry for the Penguin Readers Group prize, they describe friendships so enduring that they’ve shared Christmas nights out, birthdays, “book club babies” and also weddings with each other.

“Our book group is more than a hobby,” says Laura. “It’s a lifestyle.”

The Hawes Inn was shut and almost in darkness when we spilled out onto the street and posed for photographs in the balmy Edinburgh air close to the arches of the moonlit Forth Road Bridge.  During the evening I’d spent with these warm, lovely people I’d felt embraced as an honorary member, and by the time we said goodbye my overwhelming thought was: This makes everything worth it. All the hundreds of hours of enforced solitude. All the agonies of self doubt. All the mornings when negotiating the white cliff of paper seems harder than traversing the North Face of the Eiger.

Back in London I put on the CD. As Glen Campbell’s “Witchita Lineman” rolled back the years and the claustrophobic grey skies, I was suddenly eleven years old again in Africa, singing along with a crackling LP on a bee-buzzing summer’s day at Rainbow’s End, waiting for my father to come home from an unwinnable war.  I’m not ashamed to say I cried.

“Thanks for going all that way,” Louisa Symington, Penguin’s Book Group prize organizer, said when I called her to report on my evening at the Hawes Inn.

All that way? Edinburgh? For Laura’s Book Group, I’d go a lot further.