Even in a heatwave, our Year 7 and Year 8 most able students in English were ‘Unstoppable’ as they joined schools across the country for this month’s Oxplore Online Book Club featuring writer Dan Freedman whose novel of that name has become a bestseller since its publication in 2019.

Calling itself ‘the home of big questions’, Oxplore is Oxford’s University’s outreach programme to schools, encouraging students to engage with contemporary philosophical, ethical, cultural and scientific conundrums.

In this month’s club, erstwhile sports journalist, Dan Freedman was interviewed and revealed why he left journalism to take up novel writing and how he goes about constructing plot lines and characters. “One of the best pieces of advice I was given when I began to write novels,” he explained, “is to start just after the beginning and finish just before the end. You imagine your characters so deeply that they feel as though they have lived before the story starts and that they’ll continue to live after the story ends.”

The Oxplore Book Club is free to join and starts up again in the Autumn term. You can sign up to take part here https://oxplore.org/book-club