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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Pierre Choderlos de Laclos

The finest editions available of the world's greatest classics from Homer to Achebe, Tolstoy to Ishiguro, Proust to Pullman, printed on a fine acid-free, cream-wove paper that will not discolour with age, with sewn, full cloth bindings and silk ribbon markers, and at remarkably low prices. All books include substantial introductions by major scholars and contemporary writers, and comparative chronologies of literary and historical context.

The struggle for power between two magnetic personalities, the Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte to Valmont, is charted through a series of brilliant letters whose shimmering surface reveals all the more clearly the cynical amorality of their authors. These former lovers manipulate innocent victims into their elaborate schemes of seduction and revenge – the teenage Cécile, just out of her convent, her sweetheart the Chevalier Danceny, Madame de Tourvel, a virtuous married woman – with appalling success until events and feelings spiral out of control, and the main protagonists turn fatally upon each other. 
Over the years Dangerous Liaisons has gathered devotees as disparate as Marie Antoinette, Baudelaire and Virginia Woolf. It has inspired plays, films, ballets, operas and TV series, but it is the original novel that best demonstrates Laclos’ unique combination of comedy and tragedy, sentiment and brutality, farce and horror; and Laclos’ own subtle prose that conveys both psychological insight and an erotic tenderness as essential to the story as the verbal fireworks.

Dangerous Liaisons

Vasily Grossman

Based around the pivotal WWII battle of Stalingrad (1942-3), where the German advance into Russia was eventually halted by the Red Army, and around an extended family, the Shaposhnikovs, and their many friends and acquaintances, Life and Fate recounts the experience of characters caught up in an immense struggle between opposing armies and ideologies. Nazism and Communism are appallingly similar, 'two poles of one magnet', as a German camp commander tells a shocked old Bolshevik prisoner. At the height of the battle Russian soldiers and citizens alike are at last able to speak out as they choose, and without reprisal - an unexpected and short-lived moment of freedom. Grossman himself was on the front line as a war correspondent at Stalingrad - hence his gripping battle scenes, though these are more than matched by the drama of the individual conscience struggling against massive pressure to submit to the State. He knew all about this from experience too. His central character, Viktor Shtrum, eventually succumbs, but each delay and act of resistance is a moral victory. Though he writes unsparingly of war, terror and totalitarianism, Grossman also tells of the acts of 'senseless kindness' that redeem humanity, and his message remains one of hope. He dedicates his book, the labour of ten years, and which he did not live to see published, to his mother, who, like Viktor Shtrum's, was killed in the holocaust at Berdichev in Ukraine in September 1941.

Life and Fate

Junichiro Tanizaki

Hailed as the greatest Japanese novel of the Twentieth century, THE MAKIOKA SISTERS is a subtle tale of domestic oppression worthy of Balzac or Chekhov, In this saga of the once prosperous but now declining Makioka family struggling to marry off one of their daughters, Tanizaki presents the picture of a family and a society striving to preserve their self-respect as they come to terms with disturbing new ways in a classic confrontation of innovasion and tradition. A wonderful portrait of Japanese life in the first half of the twentieth century.

The Makioka Sisters

Mikhail Bulgakov

Kiev - Kyiv - is in chaos. Russia has withdrawn from World War I but the Germans have set up a puppet government in Ukraine. Civil war rages: the Bolsheviks have seized power in Russia, but the anti-revolutionary White Guard who have fled to Ukraine, are rallying to resist. In the meantime, Ukrainian nationalists are camped outside the capital, and a Red army is on its way to bring everyone to heel. While all this is going on, the Turbin family try to eke out their existence in Kyiv and discuss what they should do. They are exactly the sort of family - monarchist intelligentsia - for whom the future looks particularly menacing. 
Bulgakov's brilliant and evocative prose brings the city and the moment unforgettably to life and sheds some fascinating light on the complex interwoven histories of Ukraine and Russia.

The White Guard

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Dostoesky's drama of sin, guilt and redemption transmutes the sordid story of an old woman's murder by a desperate student into the nineteenth century's profoundest and most compelling philosophical novel. Grim in theme and setting, the book nevertheless seduces by its combination of superbly drawn characters, narrative brilliance and manic comedy.

Crime And Punishment

Henrik Pontoppidan

Social realism and fairy tale combine in Lucky Per, a bildungsroman about the ambitious son of a clergyman who rejects his faith and flees a restricted life in rural Jutland for Denmark's capital city. Per is a gifted young man who firmly believes that 'you had to hunt down luck as if it were a wild creature, a crooked-fanged beast ... and capture and bind it'. He falls in with Copenhagen's Jewish community, and falls for Jakobe Salomon, a wealthy heiress, who is not only the strongest character in the book but among the great Jewish heroines of European literature. 
 Per becomes obsessed with a grand engineering scheme that he believes will both reshape Denmark's landscape and correct its minor position in the world. Eventually personal and his career ambitions alike come to grief. At the heart of Lucky Per lies the question of the relationship of 'luck' to 'happiness' (the Danish word in the title can have both meanings), a relationship which Per comes to view differently by the end of his life.

Lucky Per

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