Nigella Lawson has written eleven bestselling cookery books including the classics How to Eat and How To Be A Domestic Goddess – the book that inspired a whole new generation of bakers. These books, and her TV series, have made her a household name around the world. 
 
www.nigella.com 
@Nigella_Lawson

Nigella Lawson

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Irvine Welsh

Irvine Welsh, 'poet laureate of the chemical generation', exposes the seamy underbelly of rave’s utopian dream. Lloyd, our permanently pilled-up protagonist, pushes his weekends to breaking point and beyond in this frazzled trip through Scottish clubland. He experiences the vertiginous uppers and downers of the Second Summer of Love, dabbles in a spot of disc jockeying and closes in, gradually, on some kind of redemption… 
 
Selected from Irvine Welsh's novel Ecstasy. 
 
VINTAGE MINIS: GREAT MINDS. BIG IDEAS. LITTLE BOOKS. 
 
A series of short books by the world’s greatest writers on the experiences that make us human 
 
Also in the Vintage Minis series: 
Home by Salman Rushdie 
Dreams by Sigmund Freud 
Eating by Nigella Lawson 
Work by Joseph Heller

Rave

Vintage Minis

Haruki Murakami

You’ve just passed someone on the street who could be the love of your life, the person you’re destined for – what do you do? In Murakami’s world, you tell them a story. The five weird and wonderful tales collected here each unlock the many-tongued language of desire, whether it takes the form of hunger, lust, sudden infatuation or the secret longings of the heart. 
 
Selected from Haruki’s Murakami’s short story collections The Elephant Vanishes, Blind Willow Sleeping Woman, Men Without Women 
 
VINTAGE MINIS: GREAT MINDS. BIG IDEAS. LITTLE BOOKS. 
 
A series of short books by the world’s greatest writers on the experiences that make us human 
 
 Also in the Vintage Minis series: 
 Love by Jeanette Winterson 
Psychedelics by Aldous Huxley 
Eating by Nigella Lawson 
Summer by Laurie Lee

Desire

Marcel Proust

Can we truly know the one we love? In this painfully candid book Marcel Proust looks straight into the green eye of every lover’s jealous struggle. He broods on why we are driven to try possess one another, how jealousy can outlive death, and whether we can ever reclaim those careless days of first love. There is no greater chronicler of jealousy’s darkest fears and destructive suspicions than Proust. 
 
Selected from the book In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust 
 
VINTAGE MINIS: GREAT MINDS. BIG IDEAS. LITTLE BOOKS. 
 
A series of short books by the world’s greatest writers on the experiences that make us human 
 
Also in the Vintage Minis series: 
Desire by Haruki Murakami 
Eating by Nigella Lawson 
Home by Salman Rushdie 
Babies by Anne Enright

Jealousy

Aldous Huxley

Could drugs offer a new way of seeing the world? In 1953, in the presence of an investigator, Aldous Huxley took four-tenths of a gramme of mescalin, sat down and waited to see what would happen. When he opened his eyes everything, from the flowers in a vase to the creases in his trousers, was transformed. His account of his experience, and his vision for all that psychedelics could offer to mankind, has influenced writers, artists and thinkers around the world. 
 
The unabridged text of The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley 
 
VINTAGE MINIS: GREAT MINDS. BIG IDEAS. LITTLE BOOKS. 
 
A series of short books by the world’s greatest writers on the experiences that make us human 
 
Also in the Vintage Minis series: 
Drinking by John Cheever 
Swimming by Roger Deakin 
Eating by Nigella Lawson 
Desire by Haruki Murakami

Psychedelics

John Cheever

What’s the worst another drink could do? John Cheever pours out our most sociable of vices, and hands it to us in a highball. From the calculating teenager who raids her parents’ liquor cabinet, only to drown her sorrows in it, to the suburban swimmer withering away with every plunge he takes, these are stories suffused with beauty, sadness, and the gathering storm of a bender well-done. Seen through the gin-lacquered looking glass of Cheever’s writing, your next drink may have you reaching for a lime and soda instead. 
 
Selected from the book Collected Stories by John Cheever 
 
VINTAGE MINIS: GREAT MINDS. BIG IDEAS. LITTLE BOOKS. 
 
A series of short books by the world’s greatest writers on the experiences that make us human 
 
Also in the Vintage Minis series: 
Swimming by Roger Deakin 
Eating by Nigella Lawson 
Calm by Tim Peaks 
Love by Jeanette Winterson

Drinking

Karl Ove Knausgaard

Karl Ove Knausgaard explores the day to day realities of fatherhood in the ultimate literary gift for dads. 
 
 How to be a good father? 
 
 Children’s birthday parties, unsuccessful family holidays, humiliating antenatal music classes: the trials of parenthood are all found in Knausgaard’s compelling and honest account of family life. Contrasting moments of enormous love and tenderness towards his children with the boring struggles of domesticity, this is one father’s personal experience, and somehow, every father’s too. 
 
Selected from the book A Man in Love by Karl Ove Knausgaard 
 
VINTAGE MINIS: GREAT MINDS. BIG IDEAS. LITTLE BOOKS. 
 
A series of short books by the world’s greatest writers on the experiences that make us human 
 
Also in the Vintage Minis series: 
Desire by Haruki Murakami 
Babies by Anne Enright 
Eating by Nigella Lawson 
Language by Xiaolu Guo

Fatherhood

Helen Simpson

Enjoy Helen Simpson’s sharply funny, humane take on the everyday joys and struggles of motherhood in this perfect Mother’s Day gift. 
 
 Welcome to motherhood – a land of aching fatigue, constant self-sacrifice and thankless servitude, a land of bottomless devotion, small hands and feet like warm pink roses, and velvet kisses. Here is a land where men and women, once carefree and engrossed in work and sex, now try to solve age-old arguments and search fruitlessly for another hour in the day. Perhaps you know this land well, or perhaps you’re entering it for the first time – either way, you need these honest funny humane stories from an expert guide. 
 
Selected from Helen Simpson’s short story collections Dear George, Hey Yeah Right Get a Life and Constitutional 
 
VINTAGE MINIS: GREAT MINDS. BIG IDEAS. LITTLE BOOKS. 
 
A series of short books by the world’s greatest writers on the experiences that make us human 
 
Also in the Vintage Minis series: 
Language by Xiaolu Guo 
Fatherhood by Karl Ove Knausgaard 
Eating by Nigella Lawson 
Drinking by John Cheever

Motherhood

Iris Murdoch

Bruno, dying, obsessed with spiders and preoccupied with death and reconciliation, lies at the center of an intricate spider's web of relationships and passions: Bruno's estranged and grieving son Miles; Danby, Bruno's widowed son-in-law, consoling himself with the Adelaide the maid, one of Murdoch's finest comic creations; creepy Nigel the nurse and his besotted twin Will, fighter of duels. The flooding Thames brings about the climax, and all are left changed by love and forgiveness before the old man's death.

Bruno's Dream

Nicholas Blake

A macabre surprise awaits beneath the snow... 
 
All is warm and bright for the Christmas Eve gathering at the manor. Yet as the clock nears midnight, the evening takes a disturbing turn when the family cat begins to dash its head against the walls. 
 
Could the cat be possessed, and the manor haunted? Or was foul play involved? Weeks later, when the thawing snow reveals an even more sinister sight, it becomes clear that someone is up to no good – but who? 
 
Luckily Nigel Strangeways, one of fiction's most delightful private investigators, is on hand to charm the eccentrics, outwit the police and unravel this murderous mystery. 
 
‘A master of detective fiction’ Daily Telegraph

The Case of the Abominable Snowman

Bernard MacLaverty

Set in the Northern Ireland of the 1980s, Cal tells the story of a young Catholic man living in a Protestant area. For Cal, some choices are devastatingly simple: he can work in an abattoir that nauseates him or join the dole queue; he can brood on his past or plan a future with Marcella. 
 
Springing out of the fear and violence of Ulster, Cal is a haunting love story that unfolds in a land where tenderness and innocence can only flicker briefly in the dark. 
 
See also: Lies of Silence by Brian Moore

Thomas Mann

Mann’s short stories explore his abiding interest in the split nature of humanity and the discordance of the world it inhabits. In ‘A Man and his Dog’, domestic tempests are symbols of the muddle of humanity. In ‘The Black Swan’, the demands of intellect clash with physical desires. And in ‘Mario and the Magician’ a young family on holiday in Italy encounters a creepy entertainer: Cipolla, a hypnotist with a fascist-like will to control his audience. 
 
Written between 1918 and 1953, this collection shows the literary development of one of Germany’s most important writers.

Mario and the Magician

& other stories

Toni Cade Bambara

'A magnum opus... Puts the reader at the heart of the horror that came to be called the Atlanta child murders' Toni Morrison 
 
Zala Spencer is barely surviving on the margins of Atlanta's booming economy when she awakens one summer's morning in 1980 to find her teenage son, Sonny, has disappeared. As uneasy hours turn into desperate days, Zala realizes that Sonny is among the many cases of missing children beginning to attract national attention. Growing increasingly disillusioned with the authorities, who respond to Sonny's disappearance with cold indifference, Zala and her estranged husband embark on an epic search. Through the eyes of a family seized by anguish and terror, we watch a city roiling with political, racial, and class tensions. 
 
 Written over a span of twelve years, and edited by Toni Morrison, who called Those Bones Are Not My Child the author's magnum opus, Toni Cade Bambara's last novel leaves us with an enduring and revelatory chronicle of an American nightmare.

Those Bones Are Not My Child

At once a gripping thriller and a heartbreaking elegy, this is Toni Cade Bambara's powerful final testament, a hymn to Atlanta's missing children. 
 
Zala Spencer is barely surviving on the margins of Atlanta's booming economy when she awakens one summer's morning in 1980 to find her teenage son, Sonny, has disappeared. Edited by Toni Morrison as part of Bambara's final novel, Those Bones Are Not My Child, this slim masterpiece leaves us with an enduring and revelatory chronicle of an American nightmare. 
 
BRIEF ENCOUNTERS: classic novellas and captivating stories, to be read in a single sitting or savoured over days

First Light

Walter Greenwood

In Hanky Park, near Salford, Harry and Sally Hardcastle grow up in a society preoccupied with grinding poverty, exploited by bookies and pawnbrokers, bullied by petty officials and living in constant fear of the dole queue and the Means Test. His love affair with a local girl ends in a shotgun marriage, and, disowned by his family, Harry is tempted by crime. Sally, meanwhile, falls in love with Larry Meath, a self-educated Marxist. But Larry is a sick man and there are other more powerful rivals for her affection.

Love On The Dole

Hammond Innes

The story of the Trikkala is a strange one. 
Reported sunk in 1945, she sails into port one year later, barely afloat, her crew and valuable cargo missing. What happened during that year at sea? What secrets of betrayal and murderous greed were played out on the desolate islet of Maddon's Rock?

Maddon's Rock

Kurt Vonnegut

This collection of Vonnegut’s letters is the autobiography he never wrote – from the letter he posted home upon being freed from a German POW camp, to notes of advice to his children: ‘Don’t let anybody tell you that smoking and boozing are bad for you. Here I am fifty-five years old, and I never felt better in my life’. Peppered with insights, one-liners and missives to the likes of Norman Mailer, Gunter Grass and Bernard Malamud, Vonnegut is funny, wise and modest. As he himself said: ‘I am an American fad—of a slightly higher order than the hula hoop’. 
 
Like Vonnegut’s books, his letters make you think, they make you outraged and they make you laugh. Written over a sixty-year period, and never published before, these letters are alive with the unique point of view that made Vonnegut one of the most original writers in American fiction.

Kurt Vonnegut: Letters

D H Lawrence

A novel which chronicles the lines of three generations of the Brangwen family and the emergence of modern England. 
 
Set between the 1840s and the early years of the twentieth century The Rainbow tells the story of three generations of the Brangwen family, ancient occupiers of Marsh Farm, Nottinghamshire. Through courting, pregnancy, marriage and defiance Lawrence explores love and the conflicts it brings. 
 
 WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY RACHEL CUSK

The Rainbow

Hjalmar Soderberg

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY MARGARET ATWOOD 
 
'[A] searing masterwork of Northern European literature. The retrieval of Doctor Glas in English is a bracing gift to hungry readers' Susan Sontag 
 
Lonely and introspective, Doctor Glas has long felt an instinctive hostility toward the odious local minister. So when the minister’s beautiful wife complains of her husband’s oppressive sexual attentions, Doctor Glas finds himself contemplating murder. 
 
Stark, brooding, and enormously controversial when first published in 1905, this astonishing novel juxtaposes impressions of fin-de-siècle Stockholm against the psychological landscape of a man besieged by obsession.

Doctor Glas

Margaret Kennedy

‘Margaret Kennedy caught just the taste of the time, mixing a stolid domestic Englishness with 'Continental' bohemians’ Irish Times 
 
William and Emily Crowne seem to have it all – they live a life of privilege and glamour in London, the children of a successful poet, attractive, happy, largely blind to the world around them. But life takes an unexpected turn when their mother dies, and their father is caught up in the most scandalous and notorious of criminal trials. Suddenly effectively orphans, their aunt takes them in, and they grow up alongside their cousins, Trevor and Charlotte. But tensions and jealousies are rife between the four, and soon the Crowne children find that their father’s notoriety will follow them into their adult lives, with devastating consequences.

Red Sky at Morning

Stella Gibbons

Brother and sister, Constance and Kenneth Fielding live in calm respectability, just out of reach of London and the Blitz. But when a series of uninvited guests converge upon them – from a Balkan exile to Ken’s old flame and the siblings’ own raffish father – the household struggles to preserve its precious peace. In this full house, in a quiet corner of suburbia, no one expects to find romance.

The Bachelor

'Don't show proper feelin', does it, not turnin' up for 'is dad's funeral?' 
 
Siblings Sophia, Harry and Francis have lost both their parents in the last six months. Attending the funeral for their estranged father, they wonder what will become of them now that the last connection to their difficult childhood has been severed. What have they inherited - financially and emotionally - to guide them to adulthood, and build a new home together? 
 
 Enbury Heath is a semi-autobiographical account of the years which Gibbons and her brothers spent living in a cottage in Hampstead Heath: a wonderfully astute, bittersweet novel about family, grief, money, and the pleasures of London.

Enbury Heath

Daniel Defoe

These are the fortunes and misfortunes of Moll Flanders: born in Newgate Prison, twelve years a prostitute, five times a wife (once to her own brother), twelve years a thief and eight years a transported felon in Her Majesty's colony of Virginia. Daniel Defoe's rollicking tale presents life in the prisons, alleyways and underworlds of eighteenth-century London, and gives us Moll - scandalous, unscrupulous and utterly irresistible.

Moll Flanders

Martin Amis

WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY CLAIRE LOWDON 
 
Charles Highway is every mother's worst nightmare. 
 
Precociously intelligent, mercilessly manipulative and highly sexed, Charles devotes the last of his teenage years to bedding girls and evading the half-arsed overtures of his distant parents. That is, until, he meets the aloof, wildly unattainable, Rachel. 
 
As Charles's twentieth birthday - and the Oxford entrance exams - loom, his plans for seducing Rachel will draw him into a private collection of obsessional notes and observations: the eponymous 'Rachel Papers'. 
 
WINNER OF THE SOMERSET MAUGHAM AWARD 
 
'Scurrilous, shameless and very funny' The Times Literary Supplement 
 
'Amis has brought off the feat of satirizing his contemporaries while making them both funny and, in a bizarre way, moving' Peter Ackroyd

The Rachel Papers

50th Anniversary Edition

Patrick White

To hesitate on the edge of life or to plunge in and risk change -this is the dilemma explored in THE LIVING AND THE DEAD. Patrick White's second novel is set in thirties London and portrays the complex ebb and flow of relationships within the Standish family. Mrs Standish, ageing but still beautiful, is drawn into secret liaisons, while her daughter Eden experiments openly and impulsively with left-wing politics and love affairs. Only the son, Elyot, remains an aloof and scholarly observer - until dramatic events shock him into sudden self-knowledge.

The Living and the Dead

Richard Yates

Evan Shepard is a young man with a chequered past when he first meets the Drakes, after his car breaks down outside their house. Behind him, he has a troubled adolescence, a failed marriage and a little daughter, but his meeting with the quiet and beautiful Rachel heralds a new start. However, after their swift marriage, things don't work out quite as planned and the stresses of living with Rachel's family, in their shared house in Cold Spring Harbor, begin to take their toll on the new couple.

Cold Spring Harbor

Mary Wesley

Escape to the Cornish cliffs in the dizzying heat of August 1939, where five cousins are making the most of the last summer of their youth. 
 
Oliver is just back from the Spanish Civil War and world-weary at only nineteen. Calypso is gorgeous, utterly selfish and determined to marry for money. Polly and Walter, brother and sister, play their cards close to their chests. Then there's little Sophie, who nobody loves. Soon the world will be swept into war again and the five cousins will enter a whirligig of sex, infidelity, love and loss, but for now they have one last, gaspingly hot summer at the house by the cliffs with the camomile lawn. 
 
 A beloved bestseller from an author ahead of her time, The Camomile Lawn is a waspishly witty, devil-may-care delight.

The Camomile Lawn

Uprooted from war-torn London, Alda Lucie-Brown and her three daughters start a new life at Pine Cottage in rural Sussex. Unsuited to a quiet life, Alda attempts to orchestrate - with varying degrees of success - the love affairs of her neighbours. Her unwilling subjects include an Italian POW, a Communist field-hand, a battery-chicken farmer and her intelligent friend Jean.

The Matchmaker

Virginia Woolf

WITH INTRODUCTIONS BY ANGELICA GARNETT AND JO SHAPCOTT 
 
In Night and Day, Virginia Woolf portrays her elder sister Vanessa in the person of Katharine Hilbery - the gifted daughter of a distinguished literary family, trapped in an environment which will not allow her to express herself. 
 
Looking at questions raised by love and marriage, Night and Day paints an unforgettable picture of the London intelligensia before the First World War, with psychological insight, compassion and humour.

Night And Day

Vita Sackville-West

Edwardian era love, society and politics explored in this perfect read for Downton Abbey fans. 
 
Sebastian is young, handsome and romantic, the heir to a vast and beautiful English country estate. He is a fixed feature in the eternal round of lavish parties, intrigues and traditions at the cold, decadent heart of Edwardian high society. Everyone knows the role he must play, but Sebastian isn't sure he wants the part. Position, privilege and wealth are his, if he can resist the lure of a brave new world. 
 
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY KATE WILLIAMS

The Edwardians

Gladys and Annie Barnes are impoverished sisters who have seen better times. They live in a modest cottage in the backstreets of Highate with Mr Fisher, a mild but eccentric old man living secretively in the attic above them. Their quiet lives are thrown into confusion when a new landlord takes over, a dreaded and unscrupulous 'rackman'. He installs his wife in part of the cottages in the hope that there she will recover from an unspecified malady. With a mounting sense of fear, Gladys and Annie become convinced she is possessed by an evil spirit...

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