My kitchen bible to this day... You made me realise that every meal is a celebration. You didn’t teach me how to cook. You taught me how to eat

Imagine our joy when Vintage announced that it is publishing a collection of easily digestible books from the world’s most celebrated writers on the experiences that make us human… They look good and read well. That’s win/win in our book.

Nancy Friday - guru to a generation of feminists

A clever, compassionate woman ... Women need people like Friday to write the script for them - Janet Street-Porter

Nancy Friday has never shied away from hot-button topics

Nancy Friday must be the most understanding sexologist in the country

One of the most accurate and detailed descriptions of modern power ever written

Varoufakis has the greatest political virtues of all – courage and honesty

One of my few heroes. As long as people like Varoufakis are around, there still is hope

Superbly written ... he was – and is – right

An outstanding economist and political analyst

Astonishing … a reflection on the nature and meaning of power in our times

The Thucydides of our time

In these secular meditations, Knausgaard scratches away at the ordinary to reach the sublime – finding what’s in the picture, and what’s hidden

Knausgaard is an acute, sometimes squirmingly honest analyst of domesticity and his relationship to his family.

Very intimate and full of love

I am impressed by his responsiveness, the nuanced intelligence with which he speaks.

Courageous and inspirational, without a wasted word

What he makes me see is how the personal is a possession and that this is especially true for everyone involved in the Bataclan tragedy because the personal was – and still is – in danger of being swamped by the public story of international terrorism.

He had deliberately retreated from the world that was talking incessantly about the slaughter… If Antoine refused to give his hate to the men who killed his wife and so many others, he also refuses to give them space in his life and that of his now two-year-old son.

He looked at the words on the screen as the news networks competed to find words to describe the events: massacre, carnage, bloodbath. He wanted to scream, but couldn’t because of Melvil… Initially resistant to spending time with fellow mourners, Antoine discovered that there is a kind of brotherhood, a feeling of recognition, that can provide consolation.

[A] beautifully written memoir… It’s the hardest book you can pick up this year, but also the most affecting.

It is a personal account of the aftershock following the atrocity. Yet there is no gore, no torture, no scene-setting, no facts putting the Isis-claimed retaliation in context, no second-hand reports of what happened inside the theatre… Instead, it is simple and immediate, and is all about love and loss… This book may also be Leiris’s way of just holding it together. One feels he is writing as the man he was before that November day that changed everything… It is the literary equivalent of smelling her clothes every night before attempting to sleep.

A book for our times.

This book is a love song to Hélène, a promise to Melvil and a resolution not to be defeated by chaos and barbarity. It is a stunning mission statement.

This heartbreaking and beautifully written memoir lays bare the terrible chronology of grief, but it is also a testimony to the power of love and hope.

It’s an agonising account of those first few days, in which the lives of father and son changed forever. Despite the haste with which it was written, every word is chosen with care and charged with meaning, a raw and honest memoir of grief which can’t fail to move all who read it.