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. 
 
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Nigella Lawson

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David Adams Richards

Will Jameson has a temperament of iron, standing up to men twice his age when he takes over the Jameson lumber company after his father's death. His younger brother Owen is sensitive, literary and fanciful. But when Will dies suddenly and Owen's beloved Lula rejects him, Owen's deeper character comes to light: joining the army in the hope of getting himself killed, instead Owen returns home a decorated war hero. 
 
Then he falls in love with the beautiful, childlike Camellia - the wife of Will's old friend Reggie Glidden - and soon Owen and Camellia find themselves watched on all sides, caught in the teeth of an entire town's gossip and hypocrisy. Inexorably, they are pulled into a chain of events that will end with death, disappearance and a sensational trial. 
 
The Friends of Meager Fortune is a transfixing love story and a devastating portrait of a society - but it is also a brilliant commemoration of the passing of a world, that of the lumberjacks who felled the trees by hand and dragged them down mountainsides with horses. Owen Jameson begins what will become the greatest cut in New Brunswick history, his men setting up camp on the notoriously dangerous Good Friday Mountain. The teamsters spend months in pitiless ice and snow, daily pitting themselves against nature and risking their lives for scant reward, in the last moments before the coming of mechanization that will make them obsolete. This heroic, brutal life is all Meager Fortune, the camp keeper, knows. A good and innocent man, he shows unexpected resolution in the face of the betrayals of the more worldly men around him. 
 
Rich with all the passion, ambition and almost mythic vision that defines David Adams Richards' work, The Friends of Meager Fortune is a profound and important book about the hands and the heart; about true greatness and true weakness; about the relentlessness of fate and the evil that men and women do. Wise, stark, and without a false word in it, it cements David Adams Richards' claim to be the finest novelist at work in Canada today.

The Friends of Meager Fortune

Julie Myerson

When Donna, Will and Gayle find Frank Chapman lying bruised and battered on the ground on Clapham Common, they feel drawn to help the old man. A connection is forged between the four of them that threatens to upset the careful balance of their lives...

The Touch

Rosemary Ashton

They were the most remarkable couple in London: the great sage Carlyle, with his vehement prophecies, and his witty, sardonic wife Jane.  It was a strong, close, mutually admiring yet often mutually antagonistic partnership, fascinating to all who observed it. The Carlyles lived at the heart of English life in mid-Victorian London, but both were outsiders, a largely self-educated Scottish pair who took a sometimes caustic look at the society they so influenced - Carlyle through his copious writings, and both through their network of acquaintances and correspondents.  Carlyle's fame was confirmed by his Sartor Resartus of 1843, The French Revolution, his lectures on heroes and hero-worship and by his radical account of contemporary industrial Britain in Past and Present, 1843.  Both husband and wife were great letter-writers, Carlyle commenting on the matters of the day, dashing off pen portraits of those he met and Jane with her brilliant stories and her sharp, dry humour.  Yet despite her brilliance, Jane suffered, especially from Carlyle's infatuation with the lion-hunting Lady Ashburton, and the tensions in their marriage grew.  The letters they wrote, both to each other and to others, make theirs the most well-documented marriage of the nineteenth century and give us an unequalled portrait of a famously unhappy marriage. This moving and vivid biography describes their relationship with each other, from their first meeting in 1821 to Jane's death in 1866, and also their relationship with the world outside.  Rosemary Ashton's inimitable blend of rigorous scholarship, warm sensitivity and lively wit makes this not only a portrait of a marriage but a picture of a whole age, elegant, erudite and entertaining.

Thomas And Jane Carlyle

Portrait of a Marriage

Dur e Aziz Amna

2019 WINNER OF THE BODLEY HEAD | FINANCIAL TIMES ESSAY PRIZE 
 
'Surkh gulaaban day mausam vich, 
Phulaan de rang kaalay. 
 
(In the season of red roses, 
These flowers are turning black.)' 
 
Your Tongue Is Still Yours is a poetic meditation on language, regional cultures and how identity exists in the many layers between the two. Punjabi. Urdu. English. Arabic. Balti. Shina. Khowar. Wakhi. 
 
Dur e Aziz Amna goes back to Pakistan, traversing its different regions before returning to New York, considering how language has shaped her past and how it might do the same for her children’s future.

Your Tongue Is Still Yours

Reflections On Language

Grace Wilson

'The funniest and most perspicacious memoir I’ve read this year… A brilliant commentary on the housing crisis…. It’s hilarious, not only about rapacious landlords and their creepy ways, but about friendship, work, holidays and sex, too.' 
Rachel Cooke, Observer 
 
An Observer Book of the Year 
 
Saving Grace is the story of four twenty-somethings – Grace, Vicky, Jess and Maxine – who live in a ramshackle house in a rapidly gentrifying East London…until the landlord announces he’s selling up and they’ve got four weeks to leave. New plans form effortlessly for the others, but the odds feel stacked against Grace as she struggles to find self-fulfilment, a half decent job or even a roof over her head.

Saving Grace

Charles Dickens

Paul Dombey is an ambitious London merchant. He pins all his hopes for the future of his shipping firm on his fragile son whilst his daughter, Florence, goes unnoticed and neglected. It is only when the firm faces ruin, and Dombey is staring at a life of desolate solitude that Florence may finally be valued. Can this heartless businessman be redeemed? Dombey and Son is a delicious and lively satire about pride and its downfall.

Dombey and Son

Jamal Mahjoub

Liverpool, 1958, and German refugee and inventor Ernst Frager is in search of a sense of belonging. What he finds is an unusual nightclub on the Mersyside docks, and Miranda: hat-check girl, aspiring jazz singer and daughter of West Indian immigrants. Their doomed love affair will have repercussions for the children waiting for Ernst back in London, but also for the daughter Miranda gives birth to. Almost half a century later, Jade finds herself grappling with the very questions that drove her father into the arms of her mother, and realising that a successful career cannot define an identity; nor can you separate your existence from all the many other stories connected to it ... 
 
Like the jazz that snakes its way though this beautiful novel, The Drift Latitudes is about how we improvise our lives and the chances we take. From the Nubian boy who flees the tedium of home to find the bright lights of New York's jazz scene, to Ernst's daughter Rachel who turns her back on Europe and follows her husband to the Sudan, it is about the movement of people around our globe and the interdependence of our dreams. Awash with memorable characters, filled with unputdownable stories, this is a brilliantly intricate novel that lingers in the mind long after its final note.

The Drift Latitudes

Kingsley Amis

Brought to you by Penguin. 
 
Robin Davies knows how to look after number one. Raised in a bland suburb of South London in the 1930s, Robin longs for the freedom to do what he wants. When he escapes to study in Oxford, he meets Nancy Bennett, a young woman even less worldly than himself. As Robin stumbles through his rites of passage to adulthood, involving rebellion, self-discovery, sex, war, seduction and the threat of commitment, we come to realise just how far he will go to have his cake and eat it. 
 
©Kingsley Amis 1994 (P) Penguin Audio 2020

You Can't Do Both

Julian Barnes

Major 'Jacko' Jackson, now retired, takes his yearly, self-appointed furlough to London. But time has moved on, and the kitchenware on the itemised task list his wife has provided him with is not the only thing he finds out of stock. 
 
Part of the Storycuts series, this short story was previously published in the collection The Lemon Table.

Hygiene (Storycuts)

Amy Dorrit (known as Little Dorrit) was born in the Marshalsea debtors' prison in London. She has lived there with her father and two elder siblings for all of her twenty-two years, only leaving to work each day as a seamstress for the forbidding Mrs Clennam. But Amy's fortunes are about to change: the arrival of Mrs Clennam's son Arthur, back from working in China, heralds the beginning of stunning revelations not just about Amy but also about Arthur himself.

Little Dorrit

Peter Ackroyd

VOL. 2: THE UPSTART CROW. 
Ambitious Actor and Poet. 
(c. 1590 - Midsummer Night's Dream) 
Peter Ackroyd's insightful new biography positions Shakespeare in the close context of his world. In this way, Ackroyd not only richly conjures up the texture of Shakespeare's life, but also imparts an amazing amount of vivid, interesting material about place, period and background. Walk with Ackroyd through sixteenth century London and Stratford as he uncovers the intimate circumstances of Shakespeare's life. Discover the theatrical world in which Shakespeare had his being - not just Shakespeare the actor but the other actors, playwrights, and managers that surrounded him. And journey to Stratford to meet Shakespeare the family man, whose private life had such an impact on his work that the strongest bond in his plays is always between father and daughter.

Shakespeare - The Biography: Vol II

The Upstart Crow

Ferdinand Mount

The man who rode Ampersand was in fact, an amateur jockey named Harry Cotton. Harry is a compulsive gambler. The resulting decline in his fortunes takes him through three decades of adventures, melancholy, heroic, and comic by turn, which cut a broad swathe of disorder through provincial race meetings, 'one -night cheap hotels' and three luxurious redoubts of the fabulously rich. The inhabitants and frequenters of these places are every bit as bizarre as their surroundings.

The Man Who Rode Ampersand

Sam Lock

Samuel Lock

When Richard agrees to share a flat with Chuck, his life takes a strange new lurch. Chuck is enormous, ebullient, and more than a trifle camp. He's also violently jealous of Richard and his growing friendship with George. . . Set in the bedsitter world of South Kensington in 1950s, AS LUCK WOULD HAVE IT is a strikingly original first novel, told in a voice unlike any you have encountered in modern fiction. Since first publication in 1995, it has gained an extraordinary reputation and went on to win the Sagittarius Award for 1996. 'Strange and compelling' Edmund White OBSERVER 'Very odd and original' Alan Hollinghurst HAMPSTEAD &amp; HIGHGATE EXPRESS (Books of the Year). 'A hilarious book. . . 'Rachel Cusk TIMES (Books of the Year) 'Vivid and peculiar. . Lock writes almost as elegantly as Alan Hollinghurst. . . . AS LUCK WOULD HAVE IT is memorable. ' Kate Kellaway, OBSERVER

As Luck Would Have It

Glyn Maxwell

Britain is reeling from reports of a terrorist bomb on a film set that has killed a hundred people and, possibly, the brightest star in Hollywood, Thomas Bayne. Caught up in the middle of the national mourning is Susan Mantle - a rather hopeless London tour-guide - who is seen crying on a park bench and is taken up by the media as a symbol of the blitz spirit, appearing on the rolling news with the headline 'beautiful but crying'. 
 
She is crying, though, for other reasons: she's just been told by a clairvoyant that she is about to die. Reason and the real world are quickly relinquished as Susan is swept into a media maelstrom, becoming the baffled and increasingly unwilling star of reality TV. Buffeted by the demands of her new public, and her private terrors about her own mortality, Susan starts to lose control of everything.

The Girl Who Was Going To Die

A. S. Byatt

Leaves rustle underfoot in a dark wood: two little girls, extracted from their homes in wartime London, encounter something terrifying in a forest. Later when they meet as grown women, they realise the experience has coloured their lives. A dark tale about the nature of stories themselves. 
 
Part of the Storycuts series, this short story was originally published in the collection Little Black Book of Stories.

The Thing in the Forest (Storycuts)

Gentle Nell Trent lives a simple, if solitary life with her doting grandfather in his curiosity shop. Her parents died in poverty and unbeknownst to Nell her grandfather is obsessed with winning her an inheritance through gambling, but is forced to borrow heavily from malicious money-lender Quilp. As their debts mount up Nell and her grandfather are forced to flee London, pursued by the vindictive Quilp and others who seek to exploit them, in Dicken's classic tale of pathos and villainy. 
 
 'His characters are marvellous, his insights wonderful... Dickens is the father of magic realism. You don't expect reality but you get something bigger and better' Ruth Rendell 
 
 ‘It could be argued that The Old Curiosity Shop changed the expression of grief in the English-speaking world’ Peter Ackroyd

The Old Curiosity Shop

Andrew Davies

Read her name! B. Monkey. You can still see it, emblazoned on the cars, the trains, the writing on the wall. Now she's Beatrice. Steady job, steady man, off the drugs, on the level. But going straight can't compare with the heady thrill of life on the edge. Not when the past keeps hooking in to the present. Not when Alan, her love, her rescuer, her future, can never hope to understand...

B Monkey

C. K. Stead

A chance meeting has New Zealand writer Laszlo Winter thinking back to his time in London in the late 1950s. The Empire might be in a state of collapse, but for young 'colonials', England remains a mythical place that draws them from the farthest corners of the globe. 
 
There was Australian Samantha Conlan, clever, desirable, hopelessly in love with married Jewish New Zealander Freddy Goldstein, who carried with him a dark history. Rajiv, an earnest young Indian at work on a study of Yeats and the Indian mind. The enigmatic Margot, whose bond with her athletic brother Mark troubled Laszlo in ways he didn't quite understand. Heather, the call girl with whom Laszlo exchanged lessons on Shakespeare for lessons in love. 
 
The great writers of the time, and the details of their lives are recorded by Samantha in her idiosyncratic research project that she named her Secret History of Modernism. There was all of that and more, and then there was Laszlo, knocking blindly about among them, despairing at his academic prospects, and gradually realising that he was, would only ever be, a storyteller. Now, years later, from the other side of the world, the people seem to spring to life again, in this beguiling work by one of New Zealand's foremost writers.

The Secret History Of Modernism

Peter Akinti

In a community where poverty is kept close and passed from one generation to the next, two teenage boys, best friends Ashvin and James, stand on top of twin tower blocks. Facing each other across the abyss of London's urban sprawl, they say their goodbyes in the final stages of a suicide pact. The boys jump together, each with a rope around his neck. Only Ashvin dies. James awakes in hospital, struggling with guilt and faced with his dysfunctional family, a well-meaning psychologist and, eventually, Ashvin's grieving sister Armeina. 
 
Forest Gate is narrated by Armeina, a young refugee from Somalia who, with the death of her brother, suffers the loss of her entire family. As she tells the story of her brother's life and seeks to understand why he would kill himself, she finds herself drawn to James. Seeking comfort from each other, and desperate to rebuild their lives, James and Armeina form a special bond and together set out to find a place they can both call home. 
 
Set in London, Somalia and Brazil, Peter Akinti's debut is a beautifully wrought, profoundly affecting and sometimes violent novel rich in the true history of our time. Armeina and James's journey towards life through their past is, ultimately, a powerful story of redemptive love.

Forest Gate

Susan Hill

One hot summer’s day, an old flame turns up at Lafferton HQ and Simon Serrailler is catapulted back to his days as a fresh-faced PC in the Met. 
 
That long febrile summer in the early 1990s, London was reeling from one IRA bomb warning after another. Sirens. Blue lights. Tyres screaming. People running. The army called in. And Simon in the thick of it. Until he’s pulled aside and put on a very different kind of job: his first undercover op awaits. Will the young Simon be able to hold his nerve? Or is he walking into a trap?

Old Haunts

A Simon Serrailler Short Story

Raymond Williams

Matthew Price and Peter Owen both have their roots within the borders of Wales. Together they decide to build a new town, Manod, in the depopulated valleys of South Wales. Seemingly a splendid idea, and yet a world of plotting, scheming and resistance lies in store.

The Fight For Manod

John Burnside

The Mercy Boys are four Dundee men who meet every day in their local pub and drink: first to find order, then oblivion. Each has his own ghosts, his dreams of escape. But when death comes to the Mercy Boys it comes suddenly and with staggering violence, and their dreams of leaving bleed into nightmares.

The Mercy Boys

Elizabeth Gaskell

Louisa May Alcott

To mark the publication of Stop What You're Doing and Read This!, a collection of essays celebrating reading, Vintage Classics are releasing 12 limited edition themed ebook 'bundles', to tempt readers to discover and rediscover great books. 
 
LITTLE WOMEN &amp; GOOD WIVES 
Life in the March household is full of adventures and accidents as the four very different March sisters follow their varying paths to adulthood, always maintaining the special bond between them. Sensible Meg, impetuous Jo, shy Beth and artistic Amy each have to confront different challenges as they grow up together and attempt to learn how to be both happy and good. 
 
THE CRANFORD CHRONICLES 
Follow the small absurdities and major tragedies in the lives of the people of Cranford, a small Cheshire market town, during one extraordinary year. 
The railway is pushing its way relentlessly towards the town from Manchester, bringing fears of migrant workers and the breakdown of law and order. The arrival of handsome young Doctor Harrison causes yet further agitation not just because of his revolutionary methods but also because of his effect on the hearts of the ladies. Meanwhile Miss Matty's memories of long-ago heartache are rekindled.

Stop What You’re Doing and Read…To Warm You in Cold Weather: Little Women And Good Wives & The Cranford Chronicles

Christopher Hitchens

As the Duke and Duchess of Sussex bring renewed focus to the monarchy, now is the perfect time to re-examine Christopher Hitchens’s powerful polemic. 
 
In this scathing essay, Christopher Hitchens looks at the relationship of the press and the public to the royal family, unpacking the tautology and contradictory arguments that prop it up. In his inimitable style, Hitchens argues that our desire not to profane or disturb the monarchy is a failure of reason and a confusion of reality. Fealty to the magic of monarchy stops us looking objectively at our own history and hinders open-minded criticism of our present. It is time we outgrew it. 
 
 With the recent birth of royal baby Archie, during a time of austerity and national inequality, Hitchens’s 10,000-word critique is even more relevant today than when it was first published in 1990. 
 
 'Christopher is one of the most terrifying rhetoricians that the world has yet seen' Martin Amis

The Monarchy

A Critique of Britain's Favourite Fetish

David Lodge

When the university merged his Department of Linguistics with English, Professor Desmond Bates took early retirement, but he is not enjoying it. He misses the purposeful routine of the academic year, and has lost his appetite for research. 
 
His wife Winifred's late-flowering career goes from strength to strength, reducing his role to that of escort and househusband, while the rejuvenation of her appearance makes him uneasily conscious of the age gap between them. The monotony of his days is relieved only by wearisome journeys to London to check on the welfare of his eighty-nine-year-old father, an ex dance musician who stubbornly refuses to move from the house he is patently unable to live in with safety. 
 
But these discontents are nothing compared to the affliction of hearing loss, which is a constant source of domestic friction and social embarrassment. In the popular imagination, he observes, deafness is comic, as blindness is tragic, but for the deaf person himself it is no joke. It is through his deafness that Desmond inadvertently gets involved with a young woman whose wayward and unpredictable behaviour threatens to destabilise his life completely. 
 
Funny and moving by turns, Deaf Sentence is a brilliant account of one man's effort to come to terms with deafness and death, ageing and mortality, the comedy and tragedy of human lives.

Deaf Sentence

Henry Green

A group of rich, spoiled and idle young people heading off on a winter holiday are stranded at a railway station when their train is delayed by thick, enclosing fog. PARTY GOING describes their four-hour wait in a London railway hotel where they shelter from the grim weather and the throngs of workers on the platform below.

Party Going

Matthew Baylis

M Baylis

In an attempt to escape his bizarre family and stagnation up North, tv soap-addict Alistair Strange moves to Fulham where he lands a job editing for a vanity publisher. It is an odd kind of job, but he is used to oddness: his parents are strange, his elder brother is strange his name is strange... The behaviour of his lovely but troubled flat-mate Martha, however, is odder than anything that Alistair has encountered before. Can he rescue Martha? Can he find out what his family is hiding? And is life better than tv?

Stranger Than Fulham

Deborah Moggach

Christmas should be a joyous occasion filled with peace and love, but the looming prospect of the festive season fills Russell ‘Buffy’ Buffery with dread. Retired actor, thrice divorced, hapless father – Buffy is well versed in the complicated family Christmas, shuffling between exes and children. 
 
Except this year will be different. He has inherited a B&amp;B in rural Wales, and can finally escape the nearest and dearest, and play ‘Myne Host’ to a group of paper-hatted strangers, on escape-routes from their own clans. But when the strangers check in with their emotional baggage, and the Cab Sav begins to flow, Buffy soon realises that Christmas is never without its little complications… 
 
Join the gang at Heartbreak Hotel as they run riot, and celebrate Christmas the Buffy way.

Twin Beds

Christmas at Heartbreak Hotel

Brian Thompson

London, 1875. At Lady Cornford's famous soiree (sugared almonds and tittle-tattle) everyone is gossiping about Henry Ellis Margam's latest hit, The Widow's Secret. Only a few people know that one of Lady C's guests, the enigmatic Bella Wallis, is in fact the bestselling novelist. Bella punishes evil-doers by exposing them as thinly-disguised characters in the books she writes under her male pseudonym. Armed with her pen, the handsome Miss Wallis surrounds herself with useful men: the dashing Philip Westland, possibly a government spy; Captain Quigley, Bella's fixer, and his shady assistant, Murch, who can always crack a bone or two when someone needs persuading. 
 
Westland comes to Bella with a problem: his best friend Kennett is smitten by the heiress Miss Mary Skillane. But Mary's father, Sir William is 'an old fraud with a beautiful daughter' and she has been promised to Robert Judd, a vulgar treasure seeker. Mary is due to inherit the Skillane pearls, currently residing in a red lacquer box in a Cornish bank vault. But the pearls it seems were ill-gotten, and as Bella and her band uncover more of the strange business, a new Henry Ellis Margam novel looks set to be written, if Bella can first side-step her own affairs of the heart, and evade a brutal threat to her life...

The Captain's Table

A Bella Wallis Mystery

VOL. 3: A MUSE OF FIRE. 
Successful Playwright and Businessman. 
(c. 1595 - Opening of The Globe) 
Peter Ackroyd's insightful new biography positions Shakespeare in the close context of his world. In this way, Ackroyd not only richly conjures up the texture of Shakespeare's life, but also imparts an amazing amount of vivid, interesting material about place, period and background. Walk with Ackroyd through sixteenth century London and Stratford as he uncovers the intimate circumstances of Shakespeare's life. Discover the theatrical world in which Shakespeare had his being - not just Shakespeare the actor but the other actors, playwrights, and managers that surrounded him. And journey to Stratford to meet Shakespeare the family man, whose private life had such an impact on his work that the strongest bond in his plays is always between father and daughter.

Shakespeare - The Biography: Vol III

A Muse of Fire

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