Carlo Rovelli is an internationally acclaimed writer whose books, including Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, The Order of Time, Helgoland and White Holes, have been number one bestsellers around the world and translated into over forty languages. As a theoretical physicist, he has made significant contributions to the physics of space and time and he is currently directing the quantum gravity research group of the Centre de physique théorique in Marseille, France.

Carlo Rovelli

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Martin Gayford

At thirty one, Michelangelo was considered the finest artist in Italy, perhaps the world; long before he died at almost 90 he was widely believed to be the greatest sculptor or painter who had ever lived (and, by his enemies, to be an arrogant, uncouth, swindling miser). 
 
For decade after decade, he worked near the dynamic centre of events: the vortex at which European history was changing from Renaissance to Counter Reformation. Few of his works - including the huge frescoes of the Sistine Chapel Ceiling, the marble giant David and the Last Judgment - were small or easy to accomplish. Like a hero of classical mythology - such as Hercules, whose statue he carved in his youth - he was subject to constant trials and labours. 
 
In Michelangelo Martin Gayford describes what it felt like to be Michelangelo Buonarroti, and how he transformed forever our notion of what an artist could be.

Michelangelo

His Epic Life

Rachel Roddy

This is a story of pasta. In it, Guardian columnist and award-winning food writer Rachel Roddy condenses everything she has learned about Italy's favourite food in a practical, easy-to-use and mouth-watering collection of over 120 essential pasta and sauce recipes. 
 
Short essays weave together the history, culture and the everyday life of pasta shapes from the tip to the toe of Italy. There is pasta made with water, and pasta with egg; shapes made by hand and those rolled by machine; the long and the short; the rolled and the stretched; the twisted and the stuffed; the fresh and the dried. An A-Z of Pasta suggests how to match pasta shapes with sauces, and how to serve them. The recipes range from the familiar - pesto, ragù and carbonara - to the unfamiliar (but thrilling): ziti with onion and beef, scialatielli with sea bass and lemon; capelli d'angelo with leeks and saffron. 
 
This is a mouthwatering guide to pasta from one of the best food writers of our time.

An A-Z of Pasta

Stories, Shapes, Sauces, Recipes

Sam Hart

Eddie Hart

Nieves Barragán Mohacho

When Sam and Eddie Hart opened Barrafina, their no-reservations tapas bar and restaurant in London's Soho, they had no idea how successful it would be. Four years on and it is always packed, always stylish, always lively. 
 
And so is the food: together with their Basque-born head chef Nieves Barragan Mohacho, the Harts are cooking the best Spanish food in London today. In this cookbook they share their secrets and recipes: this is not difficult, fancy restaurant food, but gutsy, fresh, sometimes delicate, sometimes hearty food, that a home cook will be able to prepare easily. 
 
First, there is food to eat with your hands: fried pimientos de Padron, salt cod fritters and delicias, the Spanish equivalent of Devils on Horseback. Then cold meats; on to fish and shellfish - from simple razor clams on the grill, to more sophisticated dishes such as turbot with cavolo nero; rice dishes and paellas; big dishes of roast and braised meat - from suckling pig for a special occasion to rabbit stew or roast cumin-rubbed pork with quince sauce; and desserts in the form of chocolate and almond tarts, cakes and the classic Crema Catalana. There is everything here to help you recreate great Spanish food at home. 
 
With over 120 recipes, Nieves, Sam and Eddie will whisk you through step-by-step instructions, showing you everything, from how to make the more difficult things, such as arrocina beans with chorizo, morcilla and pork belly, to how to cook a simple but perfect tortilla.

Barrafina

A Spanish Cookbook

Stanley Tucci

Before Stanley Tucci became a household name with The Devil Wears Prada, The Hunger Games, and the perfect Negroni, he grew up in an Italian American family that spent every night around the table. Taste is an intimate reflection on the intersection of food and life, filled with anecdotes about growing up in Westchester, NY, preparing for and filming the foodie films Big Night and Julie & Julia, falling in love over dinner, and teaming up with his wife to create conversation-starting meals for their children. Each morsel of this gastronomic journey through good times and bad, five-star meals and burnt dishes, is as heartfelt and delicious as the last. Written with Stanley's signature wry humour and nostalgia, Taste is a heartwarming read for anyone who knows the power of a home-cooked meal.

Taste

My Life Through Food

Nieves Barragán Mohacho has a Michelin star and is best known as the head chef at Barrafina, the world famous tapas restaurant. But Sabor: Flavours from a Spanish Kitchen is the food that the Basque-born chef likes to cook when she's off duty; the food that she grew up eating and the food that she still makes for friends and family. The recipes range from hearty dishes such as braised Iberian pork ribs and chorizo and potato stew, to lighter fare such as seafood skewers, clams in salsa verde and stuffed piquillo peppers, and a wealth of other recipes, from grilled hispi cabbage to baked cauliflower with salted almonds, chilli and shallots.

Sabor

Flavours from a Spanish Kitchen

Justin Gellatly

Louise Gellatly

Matthew Jones

Best known for Justin's world-famous doughnuts, the Bread Ahead Bakery in Borough Market is also home to their Bakery School, where thousands have learned to make sourdough, croissants, Swedish ryebread, pizza and much more besides. Now, using this book, you can too, from the comfort of your own home. Divided into sections including English, French, Italian, American, Eastern European, Gaelic, Jewish and Nordic baking, there are also chapters on sourdough, gluten-free baking and flatbreads. Last but not least, there is of course a chapter on doughnuts - everything you need to know to make Justin's famed 'pillows of joy' - from the classic vanilla custard to salted honeycomb.

Baking School

The Bread Ahead Cookbook

Cassandra Neyenesch

I had tried to be a good person and live a nice, normal life. It wasn’t working out. Why was I such a no-but-er? I would be a yes-ander!... And after that moment, I didn’t give another little f*ck what I did. 
 
Perdita Jungfrau thought she was going to be married to her husband forever, so falling in love with Nando, her neighbour's anarcho-Marxist roofer, is a crisis. Life seems to put every possible obstacle in their way: she’s pregnant, he has a girlfriend, he’s fifteen years younger, she’s terrified of messing up her children and equally drawn towards this magnetic man who entrusts her with his deepest secret. Now it's three years later and Nando has been murdered. 
 
As her bewildered husband tries to make sense of the wildly unpredictable person his wife has become, Perdita has other things on her mind. For starters, who is the mysterious woman sitting outside her house in a parked car all day? How can she stop her adored baby brother from being pulled under by his opioid addiction? Can someone with a childhood like theirs ever be the mother her children deserve? 
 
And most of all, what should she do with the searing memories of the affair which turned her life upside down?

A Little Bit Bad

Fran Fabriczki

'Now, remember, Mila, we live about a five-minute drive away, your mother works at an office, and you’re not Russian, your mother just liked the sound of your name.” Mila nods vigorously—a model pupil, for now, at least.“Any follow-up questions, then what do we say?” “Mind your own business.” “That’s right.' 
 
Porcupines begins in 1989 when the world has opened up again after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and Szonja Imre travels from Budapest to visit her older sister in Los Angeles. She’s an eighteen-year-old in search of adventure in the land of the free. But she is surprised to find that the sister she’s always idolised has a very different idea of what it means to live the American dream. 
 
Porcupines also begins in 2001, when Mila, Sonia’s precocious, socially awkward 10-year-old daughter, concocts a scheme, inspired by those excellent life-bibles Sleepless in Seattle and The Parent Trap, to get her mother and the man Mila is kind of sure must be her father to reconnect. 
 
The plan involves Sonia being corralled into chaperoning an orchestra of nine-year-olds (most of whom seem to be called Megan) on a road trip from LA to San Francisco, some badly spelled emails, a jar of several thousand jelly beans and a whole bunch of misassumptions. 
 
Porcupines shuttles dazzlingly between these two time lines as the fallout from Mila’s best laid plans has repercussions far beyond her imaginings, and the secrets Sonia has been holding tight to for the last decade spill out all over her carefully constructed life. 
 
This is a deliciously funny and poignant story about family and history, immigration and belonging, and what happens when walls begin to come down.

Porcupines

Rupert Dastur

It is autumn 2004 and in a farmhouse on the hills outside Llandudno, a family endures the agonizing wait for their son to return from Iraq. His decision to join up has left them reeling, yet there are other pressing concerns to be met at home: the working of the farmland that has been theirs for generations and what to do with their troubled younger son. 
 
Catrin’s childhood sweetheart comes back to their small town, giving the boys’ doting mother a glimpse into the life she could have had. And John, their father, falls once more into his gambling habit, even as the farm sits on the brink of bankruptcy. 
 
As each member of the family grasps at their own tenuous lifeline, they drift further from one another – until, on a cold winter evening, there is a fateful knock at the door. 
 
Written in luminous, exquisitely calibrated prose, Cloudless is a masterful portrayal of the fragility and resilience of human connection.

Cloudless

Angela Tomaski

‘We shall be forgotten.’ he said. ‘We shall be lost. They will scrub us away like a set of dirty fingerprints on a plastic kettle.’ 
 
The crumbling Gothic mansion of Thornwalk, long-term home of the Gilbert family, is being handed over to a chain of luxury ‘historic’ hotels. Millions will be spent in its restoration. But for every ‘improvement’, what will be lost? What value can there possibly be in a threadbare carpet, a tarnished spoon and a thousand empty jam jars? 
 
Before the hotel people arrive, with their clipboards and their skips and their bottles of bleach, Maximus, loyal guardian of the Gilberts’ legacy, invites us on a final tour of the once-stately home, where each room holds a secret. From the bolt on the blue room door to the tiny dents in the bars at the nursery window … these are the keys that will unlock the lives of the five fatherless Gilbert children. 
 
A frustrated romantic, a stubborn traditionalist, a dreamer, a diva and an explorer: The Infamous Gilberts will be cast adrift on the irresistible tides of the twentieth century, buoyed by love, buffeted by loss, and tangled together in an unputdownable story where the lines between eccentricity and madness, cruelty and love become hilariously, heartbreakingly blurred.

The Infamous Gilberts

Andrev Walden

Once I had seven fathers in seven years. This is the story of those years. 
 
I’m fizzing. I love not being his son. 
Yes. I can feel it in my whole body. A great thrill – as if an adventure has begun. As if I’m the boy in a book about a boy who finds out his dad is the king of a magical and distant land. 
 
Christmas, 1983. In the aftermath of yet another furious argument, seven-year-old Andrev’s mother lets him in on a secret: his father is, in fact, not his father. And so begins a new kind of childhood, in which fathers come and go, arriving in red Volvos and sweeping his mother off her feet. Fathers can be magicians or murderers, artists or thieves, and, like growing pains, or the weather, they appear uninvited and leave without warning. Fathers are drawn to his mother like moths to a flame – but even she can’t control how they behave. 
 
Vivid and joyful, raw and tender, Bloody Awful in Different Ways is a novel about growing up in the chaos of social change; about how love begins and ends; and above all, about men. Because after all, you learn an awful lot about this strange species when you have seven fathers in seven years.

Bloody Awful in Different Ways

Marina Lewycka

After walking out on his wife to shack up with 'Brexit Brenda' next door, George Pantis thinks he's got it made - especially when he wins millions on a Kosovan lottery he barely remembers entering. Unfortunately, he can't access the money because he's forgotten his password. What is he meant to tell all the forceful people who keep appearing at his doorstep desperate to know his mother's maiden name? The situation is shadier than he thinks, and George is need of rescue. But will his dysfunctional family be able to save him, and in the process, can they save each other?

The Good, the Bad and the Little Bit Stupid

Joanna Miller

Oxford, 1920. For the first time in its 1000-year history, the world’s most famous university has admitted female students. Giddy with dreams of equality, education and emancipation, four young women move into neighbouring rooms on Corridor Eight. They have come here from all walks of life, and they are thrown into an unlikely, life-affirming friendship. 
 
Dora was never meant to go to university, but, after losing both her brother and her fiancé on the battlefield, has arrived in their place. Beatrice, politically-minded daughter of a famous suffragette, sees Oxford as a chance to make her own way – and her own friends – for the first time. Socialite Otto fills her room with extravagant luxuries but fears they won’t be enough to distract her from her memories of the war years. And quiet, clever, Marianne, the daughter of a village vicar, arrives bearing a secret she must hide from everyone – even The Eights – if she is to succeed. 
 
But Oxford’s dreaming spires cast a dark shadow: in 1920, misogyny is still rife, influenza is still a threat, and the ghosts of the Great War are still very real indeed. And as the group navigate this tumultuous moment in time, their friendship will become more important than ever.

The Eights

Claire Fuller

1987: After a childhood trauma and years in and out of the care system, sixteen-year-old Ursula finds herself with a new job in the postroom of a local art school, a bed in a halfway house, and—delightfully— some new friends, including wild-child, Sue. When Ursula is invited to join a squat at The Underwood, a mysterious house whose owners met a terrible end, she can’t resist the promise of a readymade, hodgepodge family. 
 
But as Sue’s behaviour and demands become more extreme, Ursula who has always been hungry—for food—and more importantly for love, acceptance and belonging, carries out her friend’s terrible dare. It's a decision that will haunt her for decades. 
 
Thirty-six years later, Ursula is a renowned, reclusive sculptor living under a pseudonym in London when her identity is exposed by true-crime documentary-maker who is digging into an unsolved disappearance. But it is not only the filmmaker who has discovered Ursula’s whereabouts, and as her past catches up with her present, Ursula must work out whether the monsters are within her or without. 
 
From critically acclaimed and award-winning author, Claire Fuller, Hunger and Thirst is a compelling and chilling tale of loneliness and female friendship, of the dangerous line between wanting and needing, and of how far a person will go to truly belong.

Hunger and Thirst

Naomi Alderman

What’s the most useful thing you could know about your own life? 
 
In this era-defining book, developed from her groundbreaking Radio 4 essay series, Naomi Alderman turns her boundless curiosity and incisive thinking to a question that affects us all: how do we understand, and navigate, the epoch we’re living through? She calls this epoch the Information Crisis. 
 
The internet has flooded us with more knowledge, opinions, ideas, opportunities, as well as verbal attacks and misinformation, than ever before. It lets us learn more quickly and also spread falsehood more quickly, it brings us together and also divides us in new ways, it is now the lens through which we perceive and understand the world. There is no going back. But we have been here before. In fact, this is humanity’s third information crisis. 
 
The first, the invention of writing 5,000 years ago, and the second, the invention of the printing press 600 years ago, drastically reshaped our perceptions, interactions and mental landscapes in ways that feel acutely familiar. Overwhelmed by information, people become afraid and angry, unsettled and distressed, as well as more knowledgeable, educated and curious. By looking at those previous information crises, both the turmoil and the advances, Alderman asks what we can learn from the past to better understand our present, and prepare for our future. 
 
Drawing on the work of philosophers and historians, Don’t Burn Anyone at the Stake Today explores how new technology opens up new ways of being and helps us chart a way forward (once again), through the turbulent seas of information overload.

Don’t Burn Anyone at the Stake Today

(and other lessons from history about living through an information crisis)

Twins Jeanie and Julius have always been different. At 51 years old, they still live with their mother, Dot, in rural isolation and poverty. Their rented cottage is simultaneously their armour against the world and their sanctuary. Inside its walls they make music, in its garden they grow (and sometimes kill) everything they need for sustenance. 
 
But when Dot dies suddenly, threats to their livelihood start raining down. At risk of losing everything, Jeanie and her brother must fight to survive in an increasingly cruel and unyielding world as their mother's secrets unfold, putting everything they thought they knew about their lives at stake. This is a powerful novel of betrayal and resilience, love and survival. It is a portrait of life on the fringes of society that explores with dazzling emotional power how we can build our lives on broken foundations, and spin light from darkness.

Unsettled Ground

Winner of the Costa Novel Award 2021

Roxy Dunn

Elliot. Joe. Tommy. Nathanael. Wren. Oliver. Malik. Zach. Frank. Patrick. Noah. These are the men Margot has loved, liked, lusted over. 
 
Since she was seventeen, she's pictured them like stepping stones - each one bringing her closer to finding someone to share her life with and, eventually, father the children she's always imagined in her future. 
 
From her first sexual encounter, to her first love, from grown-up dilemmas to spontaneous thrills, she's soaked up every experience available to her, discovering friendship, joy and despair. Through all of this she's refined her search until she believes she's arrived at 'the ending' to her story. 
 
So how did she find herself here, single at thirty-four, and about to make the biggest decision of her life?

As Young as This

Susanna Crossman

In the turbulent late seventies, six-year-old Susanna Crossman moved with her mother and siblings from a suburban terrace to a crumbling mansion deep in the English countryside. They would share their new home with over fifty other residents from all over the world, armed with worn paperbacks on ecology, Marx and radical feminism, drawn together by utopian dreams of remaking the world. They did not leave for fifteen years. 
 
While the Adults adopted new names and liberated themselves from domestic roles, the Kids ran free. In the community, nobody was too young to discuss nuclear war and children learned not to expect wiped noses or regular bedtimes. Instead, they made a home in a house with no locks or keys, never knowing when they opened doors whether they’d find violent political debates or couples writhing under sheets. 
 
Decades later, and armed with hindsight, Crossman asks what happens to children who are raised as the product of social experiments. Revisiting her past, she turns to leading thinkers in philosophy, sociology and anthropology to examine the society she grew up in, and the many meanings of family and home.

Home Is Where We Start

Growing Up in the Fallout of the Utopian Dream

Gabriel Tallent

Dan and Tamma are two Californian teenagers growing up dirt poor in the shadows of the Joshua Tree National Park, one of the world’s great rock climbing meccas. Their mothers had once been teenage waitresses and best friends until their paths diverged. Now Dan’s mother spends her days locked in her room, her dreams squandered and all her hopes pinned on getting her precociously clever son out of town and away to university. 
 
Tamma’s mother holds no such ambition for her mouthy, queer, truant-playing, snaggle-toothed daughter, who everyone but Dan believes to be a troublemaker and no-hoper. But Tamma and Dan are fuelled by dreams of becoming legendary rock climbers, of devoting their lives to summiting the most challenging climbs and defying all the expectations, both good and bad, that others have for them. 
 
Climbing at sun-up, on cliff faces that test their bodies to the limit, is where their friendship is forged. It’s also the one thing that gives them hope. But as their final year of high school unfolds and their climbs become ever more dangerous, and their home lives ever more extreme, it’s inevitable that something is going to snap...

Crux

Nancy Mitford

Nancy Mitford's first novel, a set of completely incompatible and hilariously eccentric characters collide in a Scottish castle, where bright young things play pranks on their stodgy elders until the frothy plot climaxes in ghost sightings and a dramatic fire. 
 
Inspired in part by Mitford's youthful infatuation with a Scottish aristocrat, her story follows young Jane Dacre to a shooting party at Dulloch Castle, where she tramps around a damp and chilly moor on a hunting expedition with formidable Lady Prague, xenophobic General Murgatroyd, one-eyed Admiral Wenceslaus, and an assortment of other ancient and gouty peers of the realm, while falling in love with Albert, a surrealist painter with a mischievous sense of humour. 
Light-hearted and sparkling with witty banter, Highland Fling was Mitford's first foray into the delightful fictional world for which the author of The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate later became so celebrated. 
 
'A delightful comedy of manners' - The Times

Highland Fling

Felicity Cloake

Felicity Cloake has rigorously tried and tested recipes from all the greats - from Nigella Lawson and Delia Smith to Nigel Slater and Simon Hopkinson - to create the perfect version of hundreds of classic dishes. Completely Perfect pulls together 120 essential recipes from her popular Guardian columns. Never again will you have to rifle through countless different books to find your perfect roast chicken recipe, mayonnaise method or that incredible tomato sauce - it's all here in this book, along with dozens of invaluable prepping and cooking tips that no discerning cook should live without.

Completely Perfect

120 Essential Recipes for Every Cook

Anna Hope

The Brooke family are gathering in their eighteenth-century ancestral home – twenty bedrooms of carved Sussex sandstone – to bury Philip: husband, father and the blinding sun around which they have all orbited for as long as they can remember. 
 
Frannie, inheritor of a thousand acres of English countryside, has dreams of rewilding and returning the estate to nature: a last line of defence against the coming climate catastrophe. Milo envisages a treetop haven for the super-rich where, under the influence of psychedelic drugs, a new ruling class will be reborn. Each believes their father has given them his blessing, setting them on a collision course with each other. 
 
Isa has long suspected that her father thought only of himself, and hopes to seek out her childhood love, who still lives on the estate, to discover whether it is her feelings for him that are creating the fault lines in her marriage. 
 
And then there is Clara, who arrives in their midst from America, shrouded in secrets and bearing a truth that will fracture all the dreams on which they’ve built their lives.

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