This was the first Guardian book club where a reader had come as an ambassador from her sixth-form English class with a list of questions from her fellow pupils (too shy perhaps to ask them in person). "It is amazing what a humble man you are," he observed, a sentence that few "famous authors" can have heard said to them. Only afterwards had he realised that the nameless musician was in fact a "famous author". One reader recalled attending an unheralded musical performance in a cafe at the Edinburgh Fringe where he had enjoyed a long and friendly discussion with the mandolin player. Several readers talked about the role of music in the book, and the importance of the author's own proficiency as a mandolin player. He had also, he said, been given a memento - and he produced from his bag an Italian second world war helmet and held it aloft. No room for an author's signature, but he had an alternative. A couple of them had written their recollections of German massacres inside the covers of his battered copy of the novel, and he read these out to us. In the course of a couple of visits he had met Greeks who recalled the Italian and German occupations and had discussed De Bernières's story with some of them. A London teacher, he told us that he had taken the novel with him on holiday to Cephalonia, where it is set. One enthusiastic reader of Captain Corelli's Mandolin who came to hear Louis de Bernières talking about his book approached this in an unconventional manner. L ike most encounters between authors and readers, meetings of the Guardian book club end with a signing session.
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