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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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...

Starlight

John Stewart Collis

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY ROBERT MACFARLANE 
 
During the Second World War, John Stewart Collis volunteered to leave his comfortable life as an academic to work on the land for the war effort. His account of this time perfectly captures the soft-handed, city-dweller's naivety and wonder both at the workings of nature and the toughness of life on a farm. It's set in the south of England and comprises exquisitely written sections on whatever happens to take Collis's fancy and inspire his thoughtful curiosity, ranging from humorous sketches of the characters he works alongside; mini-essays such as 'Contemplation upon Ants', The Mystery of Clouds', 'Colloquy on the Rick', 'Meditation while Singling Mangolds', 'The Garden of Eden'; and celebrations of the earthworm, pea and potato. His mind ranges far and wide through literature science and philosophy as well as amazing descriptive writing, which makes for a book that is as uncategorisable as it is enchanting.

The Worm Forgives the Plough

Eliot Nailles loves his wife and son to distraction; Paul Hammer is a bastard named after a common household tool. Neighbours in Bullet Park, the two become fatefully linked by the mysterious binding power of their names in Cheever's sharp and funny hymn to the dubious normality of the American suburbs.

Bullet Park

Kingsley Amis

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.

You Can't Do Both

Graham Greene

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY MONICA ALI 
 
The love affair between Maurice Bendrix and Sarah, flourishing in the turbulent times of the London Blitz, ends when she suddenly and without explanation breaks it off. After a chance meeting rekindles his love and jealousy two years later, Bendrix hires a private detective to follow Sarah, and slowly his love for her turns into an obsession.

The End of the Affair

WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY RACHEL CUSK 
 
Writer, Samson Young, is staring death in the face, and not only his own. 
 
Void of ideas and on the verge of terminal decline, Samson’s dash to a decaying, degenerate London has brought him through the doors of the Black Cross pub and into a murder story just waiting to be narrated. 
 
At its centre is the mesmeric, doomed Nicola Six, destined to be murdered on her 35th birthday. Around her: the disreputable men who might yet turn out to be her killer. All Samson has to do is to write Nicola’s story as it happens, and savour in this one last gift that life has granted him. 
 
'A true story, a murder story, a love story and a thriller bursting with humour, sex and often dazzling language' Independent

London Fields

José Saramago

In early eighteenth-century Lisbon, Baltasar, a soldier who has lost his left hand in battle, falls in love with Blimunda, a young girl with visionary powers. From the day that he follows her home from the auto-da-fe where women are burned at the stake, the two are bound body and soul by love of an unassailable strength. A third party shares their supper that evening: Padre Bartolomeu Lourenco, whose fantasy is to invent a flying machine. As the Crown and the Church clash, they purse his impossible, not to mention heretical, dream of flight.

Baltasar & Blimunda

Carel is widowed rector presiding over a London church destroyed during the war. The rectory is home to an array of residents: his daughter, Muriel; his beautiful invalid ward, Elizabeth; their West Indian servant, Pattie; Eugene, a Russian emigre, and his delinquent son, Leo. Carel's brother, Marcus, is co-guardian of Elizabeth, but his attempts to get closer to the rector are constantly rebuffed. 
 
These seven characters maintain a constant dance of attraction and repulsion, misunderstanding and revelation, the centre of which is the enigmatic Carel himself - a priest who believes that, God being dead, His angels have been released.

The Time Of The Angels

A Victorian gentleman is forced by illness to entertain himself with the family archive, and he uncovers the Regency-era correspondence and diaries of one Miles Lufton, MP - apparently a black sheep of the family, connected with a scandal long buried. But through the pieced-together artefacts from the past, a fuller picture emerges of a man torn between two personalities - Miles, serious, studious and penniless, and 'Pronto', flirt, political mover and eternal 'extra man'. Miles longs to dispose of his disreputable alter ego, but that way lies calamity...

Troy Chimneys

Anthony Trollope

‘A tale of financial skulduggery reminiscent of recent city scandals’ Daily Telegraph 
 
 Trollope's magnificent and prescient satire about a dishonest financier who buys his way into a corrupt society, and throws it into turmoil. 
 
 When the Melmottes arrive in London everyone agrees their manners are wanting, their taste is excerable and their lineage and background decidedly shadowy. But their money is far from revolting, and city society quickly makes allowances for the mysterious financier and his family. Soon hearts, minds and family savings are swept into the whirl of Augustus Melmotte's lavish parties and exciting investment plans - but is it all an elaborate swindle?

The Way We Live Now

Robert Poste's child is back at Cold Comfort Farm. But all is not well. Flora finds the farm transformed into a twee haven filled with Toby jugs and peasant pottery, and rooms labelled 'Quiete Retreate' and 'Greate laundrie'. It is, Flora winces, 'exactly like being locked in the Victoria and Albert Museum after closing time'. 
 
Worse, the farm is hosting a conference of the pretentious International Thinkers Group - a group made up of the 'sadistic owl' Mr Peccavi, loathsome Mr Mybug and the overpowering Mrs Ernestine Thump. 
 
And worst of all, there are no Starkadders at Cold Comfort Farm. All the he-cousins have gone abroad to make their fortunes and the female cousins are having a pretty thin time of it. Once again the sensible Flora decides to take the situation in hand.

Conference at Cold Comfort Farm

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