Albert Camus (1913-60) grew up in a working-class neighbourhood in Algiers. He studied philosophy at the University of Algiers, and became a journalist. His most important works include The Outsider, The Myth of Sisyphus, The Plague and The Fall. After the occupation of France by the Germans in 1941, Camus became one of the intellectual leaders of the Resistance movement. He was killed in a road accident, and his last unfinished novel, The First Man, appeared posthumously.

Albert Camus

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Nancy Mitford

Nancy Mitford's first novel, a set of completely incompatible and hilariously eccentric characters collide in a Scottish castle, where bright young things play pranks on their stodgy elders until the frothy plot climaxes in ghost sightings and a dramatic fire. 
 
Inspired in part by Mitford's youthful infatuation with a Scottish aristocrat, her story follows young Jane Dacre to a shooting party at Dulloch Castle, where she tramps around a damp and chilly moor on a hunting expedition with formidable Lady Prague, xenophobic General Murgatroyd, one-eyed Admiral Wenceslaus, and an assortment of other ancient and gouty peers of the realm, while falling in love with Albert, a surrealist painter with a mischievous sense of humour. 
Light-hearted and sparkling with witty banter, Highland Fling was Mitford's first foray into the delightful fictional world for which the author of The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate later became so celebrated. 
 
'A delightful comedy of manners' - The Times

Highland Fling

Fran Fabriczki

Porcupines begins in 1989 when the world has opened up again after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and Szonja Imre travels from Budapest to visit her older sister in Los Angeles. She’s an eighteen-year-old in search of adventure in the land of the free. But she is surprised to find that the sister she’s always idolised has a very different idea of what it means to live the American dream.Porcupines also begins in 2001, when Mila, Sonia’s precocious, socially awkward 10-year-old daughter, concocts a scheme, inspired by those excellent life-bibles Sleepless in Seattle and The Parent Trap, to get her mother and the man Mila is kind of sure must be her father to reconnect. 
 
The plan involves Sonia being corralled into chaperoning an orchestra of ten-year-olds (most of whom seem to be called Megan) on a road trip from LA to San Francisco, some badly spelled emails, a jar of several thousand jelly beans and a whole bunch of misassumptions. 
 
Porcupines shuttles dazzlingly between these two time lines as the fallout from Mila’s best laid plans has repercussions far beyond her imaginings, and the secrets Sonia has been holding tight to for the last decade spill out all over her carefully constructed life. 
 
This is a deliciously funny and poignant story about family and history, immigration and belonging, the things we carry with us, and people we leave behind.

Porcupines

Claire Fuller

Twins Jeanie and Julius have always been different. At 51 years old, they still live with their mother, Dot, in rural isolation and poverty. Their rented cottage is simultaneously their armour against the world and their sanctuary. Inside its walls they make music, in its garden they grow (and sometimes kill) everything they need for sustenance. 
 
But when Dot dies suddenly, threats to their livelihood start raining down. At risk of losing everything, Jeanie and her brother must fight to survive in an increasingly cruel and unyielding world as their mother's secrets unfold, putting everything they thought they knew about their lives at stake. This is a powerful novel of betrayal and resilience, love and survival. It is a portrait of life on the fringes of society that explores with dazzling emotional power how we can build our lives on broken foundations, and spin light from darkness.

Unsettled Ground

Winner of the Costa Novel Award 2021

Angela Tomaski

‘We shall be forgotten.’ he said. ‘We shall be lost. They will scrub us away like a set of dirty fingerprints on a plastic kettle.’ 
 
The crumbling Gothic mansion of Thornwalk, long-term home of the Gilbert family, is being handed over to a chain of luxury ‘historic’ hotels. Millions will be spent in its restoration. But for every so-called improvement, what will be lost? What value can there possibly be in a threadbare carpet, a tarnished spoon and a thousand empty jam jars? 
 
Before the hotel people arrive, with their clipboards and their skips and their bottles of bleach, Maximus, loyal guardian of the Gilberts’ legacy, invites us on a final tour of the once-stately home, where each room holds a secret. From the bolt on the blue room door to the tiny dents in the bars at the nursery window … these are the keys that will unlock the lives of the five fatherless Gilbert children. 
 
A frustrated romantic, a stubborn traditionalist, a dreamer, a diva and an explorer: The Infamous Gilberts will be cast adrift on the irresistible tides of the twentieth century, buoyed by love, buffeted by loss, and tangled together in an unputdownable story where the lines between eccentricity and madness, cruelty and love become hilariously, heartbreakingly blurred.

The Infamous Gilberts

1987: After a childhood trauma and years in and out of the care system, sixteen-year-old Ursula finds herself with a new job in the postroom of a local art school, a bed in a halfway house, and—delightfully— some new friends, including wild-child, Sue. When Ursula is invited to join a squat at The Underwood, a mysterious house whose owners met a terrible end, she can’t resist the promise of a readymade, hodgepodge family. 
 
But as Sue’s behaviour and demands become more extreme, Ursula who has always been hungry—for food—and more importantly for love, acceptance and belonging, carries out her friend’s terrible dare. It's a decision that will haunt her for decades. 
 
Thirty-six years later, Ursula is a renowned, reclusive sculptor living under a pseudonym in London when her identity is exposed by true-crime documentary-maker who is digging into an unsolved disappearance. But it is not only the filmmaker who has discovered Ursula’s whereabouts, and as her past catches up with her present, Ursula must work out whether the monsters are within her or without. 
 
From critically acclaimed and award-winning author, Claire Fuller, Hunger and Thirst is a compelling and chilling tale of loneliness and female friendship, of the dangerous line between wanting and needing, and of how far a person will go to truly belong.

Hunger and Thirst

Joanna Miller

Oxford, 1920. For the first time in its 1000-year history, the world’s most famous university has admitted female students. Giddy with dreams of equality, education and emancipation, four young women move into neighbouring rooms on Corridor Eight. They have come here from all walks of life, and they are thrown into an unlikely, life-affirming friendship. 
 
Dora was never meant to go to university, but, after losing both her brother and her fiancé on the battlefield, has arrived in their place. Beatrice, politically-minded daughter of a famous suffragette, sees Oxford as a chance to make her own way – and her own friends – for the first time. Socialite Otto fills her room with extravagant luxuries but fears they won’t be enough to distract her from her memories of the war years. And quiet, clever, Marianne, the daughter of a village vicar, arrives bearing a secret she must hide from everyone – even The Eights – if she is to succeed. 
 
But Oxford’s dreaming spires cast a dark shadow: in 1920, misogyny is still rife, influenza is still a threat, and the ghosts of the Great War are still very real indeed. And as the group navigate this tumultuous moment in time, their friendship will become more important than ever.

The Eights

Gabriel Tallent

Dan and Tamma are two Californian teenagers growing up dirt poor in the shadows of the Joshua Tree National Park, one of the world’s great rock climbing meccas. Their mothers had once been teenage waitresses and best friends until their paths diverged. Now Dan’s mother spends her days locked in her room, her dreams squandered and all her hopes pinned on getting her precociously clever son out of town and away to university. 
 
Tamma’s mother holds no such ambition for her mouthy, queer, truant-playing, snaggle-toothed daughter, who everyone but Dan believes to be a troublemaker and no-hoper. But Tamma and Dan are fuelled by dreams of becoming legendary rock climbers, of devoting their lives to summiting the most challenging climbs and defying all the expectations, both good and bad, that others have for them. 
 
Climbing at sun-up, on cliff faces that test their bodies to the limit, is where their friendship is forged. It’s also the one thing that gives them hope. But as their final year of high school unfolds and their climbs become ever more dangerous, and their home lives ever more extreme, it’s inevitable that something is going to snap...

Crux

Stanley Tucci

Before Stanley Tucci became a household name with The Devil Wears Prada, The Hunger Games, and the perfect Negroni, he grew up in an Italian American family that spent every night around the table. Taste is an intimate reflection on the intersection of food and life, filled with anecdotes about growing up in Westchester, NY, preparing for and filming the foodie films Big Night and Julie & Julia, falling in love over dinner, and teaming up with his wife to create conversation-starting meals for their children. Each morsel of this gastronomic journey through good times and bad, five-star meals and burnt dishes, is as heartfelt and delicious as the last. Written with Stanley's signature wry humour and nostalgia, Taste is a heartwarming read for anyone who knows the power of a home-cooked meal.

Taste

My Life Through Food

Cassandra Neyenesch

I had tried to be a good person and live a nice, normal life. It wasn’t working out. Why was I such a no-but-er? I would be a yes-ander!... And after that moment, I didn’t give another little f*ck what I did. 
 
Perdita Jungfrau thought she was going to be married to her husband forever, so falling in love with Nando, her neighbour's anarcho-Marxist roofer, is a crisis. Life seems to put every possible obstacle in their way: she’s pregnant, he has a girlfriend, he’s fifteen years younger, she’s terrified of messing up her children and equally drawn towards this magnetic man who entrusts her with his deepest secret. Now it's three years later and Nando has been murdered. 
 
As her bewildered husband tries to make sense of the wildly unpredictable person his wife has become, Perdita has other things on her mind. For starters, who is the mysterious woman sitting outside her house in a parked car all day? How can she stop her adored baby brother from being pulled under by his opioid addiction? Can someone with a childhood like hers ever be the mother her children deserve? 
 
And most of all, what should she do with the searing memories of the affair which turned her life upside down?

A Little Bit Bad

Roxy Dunn

Elliot. Joe. Tommy. Nathanael. Wren. Oliver. Malik. Zach. Frank. Patrick. Noah. These are the men Margot has loved, liked, lusted over. 
 
Since she was seventeen, she's pictured them like stepping stones - each one bringing her closer to finding someone to share her life with and, eventually, father the children she's always imagined in her future. 
 
From her first sexual encounter, to her first love, from grown-up dilemmas to spontaneous thrills, she's soaked up every experience available to her, discovering friendship, joy and despair. Through all of this she's refined her search until she believes she's arrived at 'the ending' to her story. 
 
So how did she find herself here, single at thirty-four, and about to make the biggest decision of her life?

As Young as This

Susanna Crossman

In the turbulent late seventies, six-year-old Susanna Crossman moved with her mother and siblings from a suburban terrace to a crumbling mansion deep in the English countryside. They would share their new home with over fifty other residents from all over the world, armed with worn paperbacks on ecology, Marx and radical feminism, drawn together by utopian dreams of remaking the world. They did not leave for fifteen years. 
 
While the Adults adopted new names and liberated themselves from domestic roles, the Kids ran free. In the community, nobody was too young to discuss nuclear war and children learned not to expect wiped noses or regular bedtimes. Instead, they made a home in a house with no locks or keys, never knowing when they opened doors whether they’d find violent political debates or couples writhing under sheets. 
 
Decades later, and armed with hindsight, Crossman asks what happens to children who are raised as the product of social experiments. Revisiting her past, she turns to leading thinkers in philosophy, sociology and anthropology to examine the society she grew up in, and the many meanings of family and home.

Home Is Where We Start

Growing Up in the Fallout of the Utopian Dream

Rupert Dastur

It is autumn 2004 and in a farmhouse on the hills outside Llandudno, Catrin and John endure the agonizing wait for their older son to return from Iraq. His decision to join up has left them reeling, yet there are other battles at home: the working of the land that has been theirs for generations and what to do with their troubled younger son. 
 
Catrin’s childhood sweetheart comes back to their small town, forcing the boys’ doting mother to confront the life she might have had. And John, desperate to keep farm and family together, turns to ever riskier methods to stay afloat. 
 
As each member of the family grasps at their own tenuous lifeline, they drift further from one another – until, on a cold winter evening, there is a fateful knock at the door. 
 
Written in luminous, exquisitely calibrated prose, Cloudless is a masterful portrayal of the fragility and resilience of human connection.

Cloudless

Chloë Ashby

Since they first met at university twenty years ago, Maggie and Will have spent the last two weeks of every summer in France with their close friends, Lydia and Roland. Both families always look forward to this annual ritual – but this summer things are different. 
 
Will has been hiding something from his wife, and is struggling to keep his deceit from seeping into the cracks in their marriage. Maggie is worried about their withdrawn teenage son. Roland is grappling with how to grieve the death of his first wife. Lydia is trying to ignore past chemistry with an old friend while learning to play second fiddle to a ghost. 
 
Into this already conflicted fray steps Issy, Roland’s beguiling, irrepressible daughter from his first marriage. And as the August heat beats down, and the children behave in unexpected ways, the two couples find that tensions they have been trying their best to temper have begun to bubble over… 
 
Family Friends is a deeply atmospheric, sophisticated and compelling novel about what happens when the ties of love and loyalty are stretched to the breaking point, how relationships change (and don’t change) over time, and how we navigate the challenges thrown at us in every season of life.

Family Friends

Leila Mottley

When Adela Woods tells her parents she’s pregnant, they immediately send her a thousand miles away to stay with her grandmother in Padua Beach. The intention is that she will leave her baby in 'the forgotten Panhandle of Florida'. and resume her suburban life nine months later as though nothing happened. But Adela’s plans are soon washed away by the tide. 
 
First, Adela meets Emory, a new mother determined to defy the expectations of everyone around her, returning to high school with her newborn baby strapped to her chest. Then she meets Simone, ringleader of ‘the Girls,’ a group of young mothers who create a village together in the back of her red truck—dancing, breastfeeding, raising their children and themselves. 
 
The town thinks they’ve lost their way. Really, they are finding it. 
 
But as they look for love, make and break friendships, navigate the miracle of motherhood and the paradox of girlhood, Adela, Emory and Simone also find themselves on an inescapable collision course with one another.

The Girls Who Grew Big

Set at the outbreak of World War II, Lady Sophia Garfield dreams of becoming a beautiful spy but manages not to notice a nest of German agents right under her nose. Until the murder of her maid and the kidnapping of her beloved bulldog force them on her attention, with heroic and absurd results. 
 
One of Mitford's earliest novels and written before Christmas 1939, Pigeon Pie is delivered with a touch lighter than that of her later masterpieces but no less entertaining. This comedy combines glamour, wit, and a fiendishly absurd plot into an irresistible literary confection. 
 
'This sparking and deliciously acid commentary of the social world.' - The Scotsman

Pigeon Pie

Anna Hope

The Brooke family are gathering in their eighteenth-century ancestral home – twenty bedrooms of carved Sussex sandstone – to bury Philip: husband, father and the blinding sun around which they have all orbited for as long as they can remember. 
 
Frannie, inheritor of a thousand acres of English countryside, has dreams of rewilding and returning the estate to nature: a last line of defence against the coming climate catastrophe. Milo envisages a treetop haven for the super-rich where, under the influence of psychedelic drugs, a new ruling class will be reborn. Each believes their father has given them his blessing, setting them on a collision course with each other. 
 
Isa has long suspected that her father thought only of himself, and hopes to seek out her childhood love, who still lives on the estate, to discover whether it is her feelings for him that are creating the fault lines in her marriage. 
 
And then there is Clara, who arrives in their midst from America, shrouded in secrets and bearing a truth that will fracture all the dreams on which they’ve built their lives.

Albion

Kathryn Stockett

“You give a girl a taste of fresh air and then you take it away—she’ll grow fierce and wild to get it back.” 
 
Oxford, Mississippi, 1933. 
 
Eleven-year-old Meg Lefleur has learned the hard way to rely on no one. 
 
Ever since her beloved mother failed to come home last Christmas Eve, she’s been one of the “unadoptable” big girls at the town’s orphanage where she fights each day to keep her wits sharp and her spirit unbowed. 
 
When she meets Birdie, a young woman set on confronting the socialite sister who believes she’s left her impoverished family behind, for the first time in a long while it seems someone else might care about Meg’s future. 
 
But as the Depression tightens its grip, Birdie discovers her sister’s charmed life is balanced precariously upon a tapestry of lies. Then, Birdie encounters Charlie, a woman haunted by loss who has been pushed to the brink with nothing left to lose. 
 
Drawn together by circumstance, they find unexpected kinship among a disreputable, determined band of women. But in a town steeped in hypocrisy, even the smallest act of defiance can have dangerous consequences… 
 
Bold, heartwarming, and riotously funny, The Calamity Club is an unforgettable story of resilience and friendship, and a sisterhood of underestimated women who risk everything to take back control of their fates.

The Calamity Club

Rosanna Pike

Born a vagabond, Tibb Ingleby has never had a roof of her own. Her mother has taught her that if you’re not too bound by the Big Man’s rules, there are many ways a woman can find shelter in this world. But now her ma is gone. 
 
As she journeys through the fields and forests of medieval England, Tibb discovers that there are people who will care for her, as well as those who mean her harm. And there are a great many others who are prepared to believe just about anything… 
 
So, when the opportunity presents itself to escape the shackles society has placed on them, Tibb and her new friends conjure an audacious plan: her greatest trickerie yet. But before they know it, their hoax takes on a life of its own, drawing crowds - and vengeful enemies - to their door.

A Little Trickerie

Frances Ryan

'No one really talks about it. No one really talks about what it is to be a disabled woman, especially a young one. To go a bit mad. To experience pain or exhaustion or feel 92. To navigate all the standard parts of life - exams, careers, dating - but with a body that is different than everyone else’s.' 
 
Part memoir, part manifesto, and full of Frances Ryan’s trademark warmth, humour and honesty (as well as hard-hitting statistics), Who Wants Normal? explores six facets of life: education, careers, body image, health, relationships and representation, as well as how to survive life's bumps in the road. 
 
It draws on Frances’s own experience, as well as from highly personal interviews with over 50 of Britain's best known women and non-binary people with mental and physical health conditions, including Jameela Jamil, Ruth Madeley, Sophie Morgan, Rosie Jones, Fearne Cotton, Emma Barnett, Tanni Grey-Thompson, Marsha de Cordova MP, Ellie Goldstein and Katie Piper. 
 
Who Wants Normal? lifts the lid off a subject that is too often shrouded in stereotypes and silence. It offers support, inspiration and a sense of solidarity to the 1 in 4 women with long-term health conditions – and will open the eyes of anyone wanting to better understand what life is really like with a disability.

Who Wants Normal?

The Disabled Girls’ Guide to Life

Life Lessons from Disabled Women

Penelope Lively

Wry, compassionate, and glittering with wit, Penelope Lively's stories get beneath the everyday to the beating heart of human experience. In intimate stories of growing up and growing old, chance encounters and life-long relationships, Lively explores with keen insight the ways that individuals can become tangled in history, and small acts ripple through the generations. From new and never-before-published stories to forgotten treasures, Metamorphosis showcases the very best from a literary master.

Metamorphosis

Selected Stories

Róisín Lanigan

Renting is a nightmare. 
 
Áine should be feeling happy with her life. She’s just moved in with Elliot. Their new flat is in an affluent neighbourhood, surrounded by bakeries, yoga studios and organic vegetable shops. They even have a garden. And yet, from the moment they move in, Áine can't shake the sense that there's something not quite right about the place... 
 
It's not just the humourless estate agent and nameless landlord: it's the chill that seeps through the draughty windows; the damp spreading from the cellar door; the way the organic fruit and veg never lasts as long as it should. And most of all, it’s the upstairs neighbours, whose very presence makes peaceful coexistence very difficult indeed. 
 
The longer Áine spends inside the flat - pretending to work from home; dissecting messages from the friends whose lives seem to have moved on without her - the less it feels like home. And as Áine fixates on the cracks in the ceiling, it becomes harder to ignore the cracks in her relationship with Elliott...

I Want To Go Home But I'm Already There

Carol Atherton

Twenty years ago, Carol Atherton and her husband Matthew stood together on the doorstep of a suburban house waiting to meet the small, red-headed toddler who would soon be woven into the fabric of their lives. 
 
But that moment was only one of many thresholds they crossed on their journey to becoming adoptive parents. In the years leading up to it, they had found their path strewn with countless questions and clouded by the myths that have shaped our collective ideas about adoption. 
 
What was the truth behind the sensationalist headlines and the dramatic depictions in books, film and television? What level of scrutiny would Carol and Matthew face? Who would their child be, and how had they come to be adopted? And what would they need from the family who were going to give them a home? 
 
In the months following the first nervous call to the adoption agency, all Carol and Matthew’s assumptions would be upended. They would meet social workers, judges, support networks and foster carers, learning not only about the process, but also about the wider social and political realities of adoption – its complicated history, past injustices and ever-evolving future. 
 
So Many Ways to Belong is the handhold Carol wishes she’d had two decades ago, when doubt and uncertainty shadowed every step. Honest, illuminating and essential reading for those whose life has been—or may yet be—touched by adoption, and for anyone wanting to better understand its story, this is an empathetic exploration of belonging, identity and our very human need for rootedness: to know who we are, where we’ve come from, and how we fit in.

So Many Ways to Belong

A Personal History of Adoption

Marina Lewycka

After walking out on his wife to shack up with 'Brexit Brenda' next door, George Pantis thinks he's got it made - especially when he wins millions on a Kosovan lottery he barely remembers entering. Unfortunately, he can't access the money because he's forgotten his password. What is he meant to tell all the forceful people who keep appearing at his doorstep desperate to know his mother's maiden name? The situation is shadier than he thinks, and George is need of rescue. But will his dysfunctional family be able to save him, and in the process, can they save each other?

The Good, the Bad and the Little Bit Stupid

Martina Hefter

Juno Isabella Flock is a dancer and performance artist who spends her days caring for her ailing husband, and her nights chatting to love scammers online. She’s aware of the risks these men pose – she’s watched a documentary about them – but she’s also discovered a heady freedom in these online conversations, and the things they allow her to say. 
 
When Juno meets Owen_Wilson223 – or, to use his real name, Benu - she senses an immediate connection between them, even though they're separated by thousands of miles. Gradually, they reveal more and more about themselves to each other: about their real selves, and about who they really want to be. And just as Juno sees through Benu’s lies, he sees through hers too. 
Hey, Good Morning, How Are You? is a whirlwind of a novel. It’s about yearning to stay young while age marches on; it’s about how to stay truthful while the internet changes everything; it’s about love and desire in all their many, conflicting forms. And most of all, it’s a novel about the way we are all connected, by the same constellations and the same night sky, however different our circumstances.

Hey, Good Morning, How are you?

Courtney Gustafson

Previously published as Poets Square: A Memoir in Thirty Cats 
 
People kept asking: Why would you have cats that don’t love you back? 
 
The morning after Courtney Gustafson moved into an old house in the Poets Square neighbourhood of Tucson, Arizona, she noticed tiny pawprints all over her driveway. They were the first evidence of a colony of feral cats who would, in time, become part of her family and help pierce a personal darkness she’d wrestled with for much of her life. 
 
Beebs was the first cat to appear, allowing herself to be petted in the driveway. And then came so many others. There was Monkey, the hissing, dark-blotched calico, and Reverse Monkey, her timid, white-blotched opposite. There were Sad Boy and Lola, the inseparable pair who made their way across the internet and into strangers’ wedding vows. There was the sweet, serene Dr. Big Butt, who brought lessons about grief. And there was Goldie, the tiny king of Poets Square: sick, skinny, but completely unafraid. These cats – and many, many others – would expand her world spectacularly. 
 
Poets Square is a love letter to community in a broken society, told through the cats Courtney meets in dark alleys, neglected homes and her own driveway; cats she cherishes and must sometimes let go. Above all, she explores what her encounters with feral cats can teach us about care, connectedness and the power of hope.

The Cats of Poets Square

A Memoir in Thirty Feral Cats

Grace Murray

If I ever woke up with an ungodly dread — that I could change it all now, turn around, and confess — I ignored it. I had never been good, and there was no point in trying now. 
 
On a small liberal arts campus in upstate New York, Charlotte begins her final year with a lie. Her father died over the summer, she says. Heart attack. Very sudden. 
 
Charlotte had never been close with her classmates but as she repeats her tale, their expressions soften into kindness. And so she learns there are things worth lying for: attention, affection, and, as she embarks on a relationship with fellow student Katarina, even love. All she needs to do is keep control of the threads that hold her lie – and her life – together. 
 
But six thousand miles away, alone in the grey two-up-two-down Staffordshire terrace she grew up in, her father is very much alive, watching television and drinking beer. Charlotte has always kept difficult truths at arm’s length, but his resolve to visit his distant daughter might just be the one thing she can’t control.

Blank Canvas

Martin Gayford

At thirty one, Michelangelo was considered the finest artist in Italy, perhaps the world; long before he died at almost 90 he was widely believed to be the greatest sculptor or painter who had ever lived (and, by his enemies, to be an arrogant, uncouth, swindling miser). 
 
For decade after decade, he worked near the dynamic centre of events: the vortex at which European history was changing from Renaissance to Counter Reformation. Few of his works - including the huge frescoes of the Sistine Chapel Ceiling, the marble giant David and the Last Judgment - were small or easy to accomplish. Like a hero of classical mythology - such as Hercules, whose statue he carved in his youth - he was subject to constant trials and labours. 
 
In Michelangelo Martin Gayford describes what it felt like to be Michelangelo Buonarroti, and how he transformed forever our notion of what an artist could be.

Michelangelo

His Epic Life

Rachel Roddy

This is a story of pasta. In it, Guardian columnist and award-winning food writer Rachel Roddy condenses everything she has learned about Italy's favourite food in a practical, easy-to-use and mouth-watering collection of over 120 essential pasta and sauce recipes. 
 
Short essays weave together the history, culture and the everyday life of pasta shapes from the tip to the toe of Italy. There is pasta made with water, and pasta with egg; shapes made by hand and those rolled by machine; the long and the short; the rolled and the stretched; the twisted and the stuffed; the fresh and the dried. An A-Z of Pasta suggests how to match pasta shapes with sauces, and how to serve them. The recipes range from the familiar - pesto, ragù and carbonara - to the unfamiliar (but thrilling): ziti with onion and beef, scialatielli with sea bass and lemon; capelli d'angelo with leeks and saffron. 
 
This is a mouthwatering guide to pasta from one of the best food writers of our time.

An A-Z of Pasta

Stories, Shapes, Sauces, Recipes

Sam Hart

Eddie Hart

Nieves Barragán Mohacho

When Sam and Eddie Hart opened Barrafina, their no-reservations tapas bar and restaurant in London's Soho, they had no idea how successful it would be. Four years on and it is always packed, always stylish, always lively. 
 
And so is the food: together with their Basque-born head chef Nieves Barragan Mohacho, the Harts are cooking the best Spanish food in London today. In this cookbook they share their secrets and recipes: this is not difficult, fancy restaurant food, but gutsy, fresh, sometimes delicate, sometimes hearty food, that a home cook will be able to prepare easily. 
 
First, there is food to eat with your hands: fried pimientos de Padron, salt cod fritters and delicias, the Spanish equivalent of Devils on Horseback. Then cold meats; on to fish and shellfish - from simple razor clams on the grill, to more sophisticated dishes such as turbot with cavolo nero; rice dishes and paellas; big dishes of roast and braised meat - from suckling pig for a special occasion to rabbit stew or roast cumin-rubbed pork with quince sauce; and desserts in the form of chocolate and almond tarts, cakes and the classic Crema Catalana. There is everything here to help you recreate great Spanish food at home. 
 
With over 120 recipes, Nieves, Sam and Eddie will whisk you through step-by-step instructions, showing you everything, from how to make the more difficult things, such as arrocina beans with chorizo, morcilla and pork belly, to how to cook a simple but perfect tortilla.

Barrafina

A Spanish Cookbook

Amanda Peters

As I stood under it, looking up into the branches, listening as the wind rustled the leaves, I could hear my Kiju’s voice: “This tree holds our stories.” And as I looked down at the dirt at the base and the two strong roots that protruded from the ground where women had placed their bodies for hundreds of years before these town people were even on this land, I swear the tree spoke to me in the voices of every woman who ever laid under it, whoever welcomed their next generation, one who passed out of this world at the same time she gave life to this world. 
 
Aliet is seventeen and has been raised by her wise, loving grandmother, her Kiju. Near their home, in the village where their Indigenous community has lived for generations, is a tree, with roots pushing out of the hard earth before retreating underground, providing a cradle for women to lean into. This is the birthing tree, where women of this community have always come to deliver their babies. It is the place where Aliet was born. But it is also the place where her mother died, gently held by the tree’s roots as Aliet came into the world. 
 
Times are changing, and although Kiju has a wealth of Indigenous knowledge and experience to share, local women are increasingly reluctant to follow their community’s traditional birthing rituals. At the local hospital, white doctors are sceptical of Indigenous practices, and Aliet and Kiju are distraught to witness their dismissiveness turn to action, resulting in their traditions being outlawed - even for women who are determined to choose for themselves. 
 
Twenty-three years later, Aliet is living in the city, leading a quiet, unremarkable life while she grapples with a personal tragedy, the trauma of which has shaped her adulthood. She works as a nurse, administering the medicine which replaced Indigenous wisdom while still holding her grandmother’s herbal recipes and wonderful stories dear. But when Kiju passes away suddenly, grief-stricken Aliet understands that she must return to the place where she was raised: it is only these roots that can help her reconnect with her grandmother, and herself.

The Birthing Tree

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