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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Jeanette Winterson

How do we love? With romance. With work. Through heartbreak. Throughout a lifetime. As a means, but not an end. Love in all its forms has been an abiding theme of Jeanette Winterson’s writing. Here are selections from her books about that impossible, essential force, stories and truths that search for the mythical creature we call Love. 
 
Selected from the books of Jeanette Winterson 
 
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: 
Eating by Nigella Lawson 
Jealousy by Marcel Proust 
Babies by Anne Enright 
Desire by Haruki Murakami

Love

Vintage Minis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Margaret Kennedy

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

Thomas Mann

Wealthy, esteemed, and deeply rooted in tradition, the Buddenbrook family epitomises nineteenth-century German bourgeois values. 
 
But as the tides of modernity and change sweep through Europe, their once-stable world begins to crumble, along with the tenets on which the Buddenbrooks built their success. Spanning four generations, this semi-autobiographical family epic records the transition of genteel Germanic stability to a very modern uncertainty. 
 
'Perhaps the first great novel of the 20th century' New York Times

Buddenbrooks

‘She is not only a romantic but an anarchist, and she knows the ways of men and women very well indeed’ Anita Brookner 
 
 
Hugo Potts is a successful London playwright enjoying his moment of notoriety. Adored by critics and pursued by women, he’s the darling of the literary scene. But his public personae is exactly that – a personae – and he works exhaustedly day and night to portray the person the public expect him to be. One weekend he attends a party at a country house alongside the most important publishers and writers of the time. It’s an opportunity, of course, to meet interesting women. But over the course of the weekend he finds himself scorned by one, and unexpectedly profoundly understood by another, and his values and everything he’s held to be important abruptly come into question.

Return I Dare Not

John Fowles

'A remarkable performance... As gripping as The Collector and The Magus' Observer 
 
Charles Smithson, a respectable engaged man, meets Sarah Woodruff as she stands on the Cobb at Lyme Regis, staring out to sea. Charles falls in love, but Sarah is a disgraced woman, and their romance will defy all the stifling conventions of the Victorian age. 
 
Widely acclaimed since publication, The French Lieutenant's Woman is the best-loved of John Fowles's novels.

The French Lieutenant's Woman

Dodie Smith

'This book has one of the most charismatic narrators I've ever met' J K Rowling 
 
'I write this sitting in the kitchen sink' is the first line of this timeless, witty and enchanting novel about growing up. 
 
Cassandra Mortmain lives with her bohemian and impoverished family in a crumbling castle in the middle of nowhere. Her journal records her life with her beautiful, bored sister, Rose, her fading glamorous stepmother, Topaz, her little brother Thomas and her eccentric novelist father who suffers from a financially crippling writer's block. However, all their lives are turned upside down when the American heirs to the castle arrive and Cassandra finds herself falling in love for the first time. 
 
'I know of few novels that inspire as much fierce lifelong affection in their readers' Joanna Trollope 
 
**One of the BBC's 100 Novels That Shaped Our World**

I Capture the Castle

A beautiful coming-of-age novel about first love

W. Somerset Maugham

Looking out upon the backstreets, the suburbs and the high society haunts of Edwardian London, the delightfully witty and independent spinster Miss Ley surveys a tangled web of lives; she sympathetically observes the struggle under the pressures of convention, and the complex interplay between love and reason. Through Miss Ley's eyes we witness the brief but happy marriage of a dying poet; a woman's adulterous passion for a young rascal, and finally, an honourable man's decision to take virtue to extremes.

Merry Go Round

Virginia Woolf

<a href="https://shop.penguin.co.uk/products/virginia-woolf-s-greatest-works-by-vintage-classics?&amp;utm_source=Penguin.co.uk&amp;utm_medium=Linked_text&amp;utm_campaign=Virginia_Woolf_series_page_31_10">Buy all seven titles in this collection for £45</a>

Discover the most popular of Woolf's books during her lifetime - a powerful portrait of a family coping with changes wrought by the new twentieth century. 
 
The Years follows the lives of the Pargiters, a large middle-class London family, from an uncertain spring in 1880 to a party on a summer evening in the 1930s. We see them each endure and remember heart-break, loss, radical change and stifling conformity, marriage and regret. Written in 1937, this was the most popular of Virginia Woolf's novels during her lifetime, and is a powerful indictment of 'Victorianism' and its values. 
 
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY SUSAN HILL

The Years (Vintage Classics Woolf Series)

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY LYNNE TRUSS 
 
'Stella Gibbons is the Jane Austen of the twentieth century' The Times 
 
Set in wartime London, Westwood tells the story of Margaret Steggles, a plain bookish girl whose mother has told her that she is not the type that attracts men. Her schoolfriend Hilda has a sunny temperament and keeps her service boys 'ever so cheery'. When Margaret finds a ration book on Hampstead Heath the pompous writer Gerard Challis enters both their lives. Margaret slavishly adores Challis and his artistic circle; Challis idolises Hilda for her hair and her eyes and Hilda finds Gerard's romantic overtures a bit of a bind. This is a delightfully comic and wistful tale of love and longing.

Westwood

Rafael Sabatini

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY BEN KANE 
 
Oliver Tressilian, a Cornish gentleman, is blessed with 'youth, wealth, and good digestion'. He is betrayed by his half-brother and becomes a renegade and Barbary corsair winning the title of Sakr-el-Bahr - hawk of the sea. This is the thrilling, full-blooded adventure of how a man wronged became the scourge of the Mediterranean and the terror of Christians...

The Sea-Hawk

Charlotte Brontë

A beautiful deluxe gift edition of Charlotte Bronte's masterpiece 
 
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY MAGGIE O'FARRELL 
 
As an orphan, Jane's childhood is full of trouble, but her stubborn independence and sense of self help her to steer through the miseries inflicted by cruel relatives and a brutal school. A position as governess at the Thornfield Hall promises a kind of freedom. But Thornfield is a house full of secrets, its master a passionate, tormented man, and before long Jane faces her greatest struggle in a choice between love and self-respect. 
 
VINTAGE CLASSICS BRONTE SERIES - beautiful editions, three iconic stories, three extraordinary women.

Jane Eyre (Vintage Classics Bronte Series)

Chi Zijian

'A long-time confidante of the rain and snow, I am ninety years old. The rain and snow have weathered me, and I too have weathered them' 
 
At the end of the twentieth century an old woman sits among the birch trees and reflects on the joys and tragedies that have befallen her people. A member of the Evenki tribe who wander the forests of north-eastern China, hers was a life lived in close sympathy with nature at its most beautiful and cruel. 
 
Then, in the 1930s, the intimate, secluded world of the tribe is shattered when the Japanese army invades China. The Evenki cannot avoid being pulled into the brutal conflict that marks the beginning of the end of life as they know it. 
 
'An atmospheric modern folk-tale, the saga of the Evenki clan of Inner Mongolia - nomadic reindeer herders whose traditional life alongside the Argun river endured unchanged for centuries... This is a fitting tribute to the Evenki by a writer of rare talent' Financial Times 
 
VINTAGE EARTH is a collection of novels to transform our relationship with the natural world. Each one is a work of creative activism, a blast of fresh air, a seed from which change can grow. The books in this series reconnect us to the planet we inhabit - and must protect. Discover great writing on the most urgent story of our times.

The Last Quarter of the Moon

A novel from the Vintage Earth collection

Jane Austen

'Beautifully designed... Perfect collectable gift for Austen fans and design devotees' So Darling 
 
Elinor is as prudent as her sister Marianne is impetuous. Each must learn from the other after they are they are forced by their father's death to leave their home and enter into the contests of polite society. The charms of unsuitable men and the schemes of rival ladies mean that their paths to success are thwart with disappointment but together they attempt to find a way to happiness. 
 
 WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY FRANCESCA SEGAL

Sense and Sensibility (Vintage Classics Austen Series)

Nevil Shute

During the Second World War, Peter Marshall's crew become one of the most successful bombing teams in their Oxfordshire airbase. However, when Peter falls in love with a young WAAF officer, his concentration begins to suffer and it looks as though his perfect run of missions - and his life - may be threatened.

Pastoral

Xiaolu Guo

A charming and clever account of one woman’s exploration of love, language and identity. 
 
Twenty-three-year-old Zhuang (or Z as she calls herself) arrives in London to spend a year learning English. Struggling to find her way in the city, and through the puzzles of tense, verb and adverb; she falls for an older Englishman and begins to realise that the landscape of love is an even trickier terrain... 
 
VINTAGE VOYAGES: A world of journeys, from the tallest mountains to the depths of the mind

A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers

(Vintage Voyages)

Elizabeth Bowen

A packet of letters, found in an attic, leads young Jane into the world of love. The attic is in Montefort, a corroding country house in County Cork, which harbours a collection of people held there by ties of kinship or habit, and haunted by the memory of its former owner. During a hot and dry summer, Jane pursues her romantic imaginings, while not far off the rich, promiscuous Lady Latterly waits to play her part in Jane's awakening.

A World Of Love

** AS HEARD ON BBC RADIO 4 BOOK AT BEDTIME ** 
 
'Stella Gibbons's gift is very special' Daily Express 
 
Amy, a neglected motherless child in 1920s London meets Robert, a wealthy American boy. It's an encounter she will never forget. 
 
My American follows the lives and loves of Amy Lee and Robert Vorst: from a chance childhood meeting to the comic, tragic and romantic trysts that follow. Amy, a baker's daughter, has dreams of becoming a writer, whilst Robert is destined to be a doctor. Later, embarking on a lecture tour in Depression-era America, she is reminded of her childhood friend and endeavours to find him. 
 
My American is an unashamedly romantic novel by Stella Gibbons, author of the beloved satire Cold Comfort Farm.

My American

A young English woman leaves her ageing parents to visit friends living in the Australian outback. She falls in love, both with the country and with Carl, a doctor and Czech refugee. Brought together through dramatic encounters and strange twists of fate, their relationship hangs in the balance when Jennifer is called back to England.

The Far Country

Walter Scott

Read the first historical novel - this tale of romance and adventure during the 1745 Jacobite rebellion will stir the blood and warm the heart. 
 
 King George is on the throne, but there are those in Scotland who swear loyalty to the Stuart heir, Bonnie Prince Charlie, and are prepared to stake his claim in conflict and bloodshed. Young Edward Waverley is caught in the middle: son of a Hanoverian yet nephew and heir to a Jacobite, a captain in the King's army yet drawn to the brave Highlanders and their romantic history. Edward must choose where his loyalties lie, even as his heart is torn between gentle Rose Brawardine, and the passionate, principled Flora Mac-Ivor. 
 
 ‘Waverley is the first great historical novel and should be ranked alongside Stendhal's The Charterhouse of Parma or Tolstoy's War and Peace’ Independent

Waverley

Isaac Marion

Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet is completely reimagined in this unforgettable zombie love story. 
 
‘R’ is a zombie. He has no name, no memories, and no pulse, but he has dreams. Amongst the ruins of an abandoned city, R meets a girl. Her name is Julie and she is the opposite of everything he knows – warm and bright and very much alive, she is a blast of colour in a dreary grey landscape. For reasons he can’t understand, R chooses to save Julie instead of eating her, and a tense yet strangely tender relationship begins. 
 
This has never happened before. It breaks the rules and defies logic, but R is no longer content with life in the grave. He wants to breathe again, he wants to live, and Julie wants to help him. But their grim, rotting world won’t be changed without a fight... 
 
‘The zombie novel with a heart' Guardian 
 
SHAKESPEARE RETOLD: Time travel. Zombies. Power-hungry media moguls. This is Shakespeare as you’ve never seen him before: nine iconic plays transformed by the best novelists of our time, with covers by Michael Craig-Martin.

Warm Bodies

(The Warm Bodies Series)

Rosemary Tonks

WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY STEWART LEE 
 
'Should The Bloater be republished? Oh God, absolutely, it's fantastic' Stewart Lee 
 
Min works at the BBC as an audio engineer, where she is struggling to replicate the sound of a heartbeat. At home, other matters of the heart are making a mockery of life as Min knows it. 
 
Min has found herself the object of her lodger's affection. An internationally renowned opera singer she's nicknamed 'The Bloater', Min is disgusted and attracted to him in equal measure. But with a husband so invisible that she accidentally turns the lights off on him even when he's still in the room, Min can't quite bring herself to silence The Bloater's overtures. 
 
 Vain, materialistic, yet surprisingly tender, The Bloater is a sparklingly ironic comedy of manners for all flirtatious gossips who love to hate and hate to love. 
 
PRAISE FOR THE BLOATER 
 
'A wonderfully unromantic romantic comedy' Daily Telegraph 
 
'Uncommonly good' Guardian 
 
 'It is the perfect aperitif, makes you feel warm and careless and much, much happier' The Times

The Bloater

The brilliantly original rediscovered classic comedy of manners

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