What sets her apart from every other food writer is her empathy with working women and her realism

If I could only keep one cookbook, this would be it. How To Eat suits the way I cook. It is as if Nigella is sitting on a stool next to me in the kitchen as I’m cooking ... With every page you know she loves this stuff, and she wants you to love it too. It’s a very, very special book for me. My own copy is falling apart.

A masterclass in food writing – one glance shows how good she really is

A classic of the genre

Miss Lawson is the Thinking Person’s Cook. She tells stories, she explains why things must be the way she says they must be... enlightenment and sensual pleasure

A gloriously sensual wander through the possibilities of food. The recipes read more like seduction than instruction

I love Nigella Lawson’s writing and I love her recipes

Her prose is as nourishing as her recipes

Nigella Lawson is one of the best and most influential of British food writers

The domestic bible for the millennium generation

Nigella Lawson is, whisks down, Britain's funniest and sexiest food writer, a raconteur who is delicious whether detailing every step on the way towards a heavenly roast chicken and root vegetable couscous or explaining why 'cooking is not just about joining the dots'

I’m inspired by Nigella Lawson’s How to Eat… It’s about a lifestyle and an attitude

[Nigella] brings you into her life and tells you how she thinks about food, how meals come together in her head...and how she cooks for family and friends... A breakthrough

How to Eat is suffused with the idea that eating a good meal – together, with another, or on your own – is healing and renewing, no matter how simple the meal, no matter how difficult the circumstances

Two decades on, the task of trusting our own palates to tell us what to eat has become more complicated than ever… There has never been a better time to return to the sanity of this book and its call to come to our senses in the kitchen

Only one [cookbook] among my collection could be described as a true friend

This is a book to reach for when hastily organising a last-minute dinner with friends; contemplating a store-cupboard meal for one; trying to tempt a fussy toddler; or when planning a leisurely weekend lunch, when you have nothing to do but stir a pot… Nigella's back catalogue has steered us through many a social situation

The recipes are stories as much as instructions… while there are ingredients lists, the words run on like a well-ordered stream of consciousness

This is a book to be read cover to cover, like a novel. Buy yourself two copies: one for reading and one for use in the kitchen

I love novels that are obsessed with the "erotics of knowledge," books that understand how ideas are not the opposite of feelings but rather their intense distillation. A. S. Byatt's "Possession," Ann Patchett's "State of Wonder," Barbara Kingsolver's recent "Unsheltered," and Nell Freudenberger's forthcoming "Lost and Wanted" all are marvelous depictions of the direct link between the body's cravings and the passions of the mind

Freudenberger's outstanding achievement is that Lost and Wanted is also a moving story about down-to-earth issues like grief and loneliness

A true triumph

An unambiguous success

A marvellous book

A deliciously precise and perceptive writer

An incandescent talent

Genuinely moving . . . Freudenberger demonstrates her assurance as a novelist and her knowledge of the complicated arithmetic of familial love, and the mathematics of romantic passion

Every minute I was away from this book I was longing to be back in the world she created

An ode to the companionship of the women on the neonatal ward in the darkest, most volatile days, it is moving but never mawkish

A song of praise to the beleaguered, indomitable NHS, with writing at such a pitch that it lingered with me all year

A heart-tugging account… this is one of the year’s most exquisitely written books