‘A remarkable tale’ The Spectator

A giant wheel of Comte´ – a cheese full of delight, a mosaic of flavour – can sometimes become flat. Despite all that’s gone into making it and caring for it, its complexity mysteriously vanishes, its spark dies. Cheesemongers know that. That’s why they regularly test the cheeses: they insert a cheese iron deep into the wheel and extract a sample from its core. Sometimes they can cure it and sometimes they can’t.

A highly successful BBC and Guardian Journalist, somehow Michael Finnerty's life had become flat. His psychological cheese iron told him he needed to make a change, and he becomes convinced his salvation lies in cheese. Michael becomes an apprentice cheesemonger at Borough Market, and is plunged into a world of intense physicality, extraordinary knowledge, and total geeky passion. From learning the cheese's personal nighttime riders – Castillon Frais needs to sit in its box underneath some waxed paper but its box needs to be kept in a plastic sheath, Comté sits unwrapped in a cool cupboard, and has a quick saline bath before bed – to learning intricate ways to wrap their different shapes; from being able to taste nuances between the cheeses, to slicing fingers, bruising toes, getting allergic reactions, and the simple dog-tiredness of being on your feet from the crack of dawn till night, Michael's new job is more demanding than he could ever have imagined – and he loves it. Then when Borough Market is subjected to a terrifying attack, Michael realises through cheese, he has found something even more powerful – community.

‘Touching, absorbing and unflinching… shows you how to stomach life’s shit, celebrate the ugly, and keep going' Angela Hui

Eat bitter is a Chinese proverb meaning ‘endure hardship to taste sweetness.’ For Lydia Pang, it embodies the struggles of her Hakka ancestors, a persecuted Chinese ethnic group whose ingenuity shaped a food culture rooted in fermenting and foraging.

Pang reimagines eating bitter as a philosophy to confront her own challenges: burning out, testing her marriage, navigating fertility struggles and caring for a parent. Through eight recipes, she shares food as memory and medicine: the silly egg noodles her father cooked when her sister was ill, the bone broth she boiled in New York while homesick and courgettes grown in rural Wales as a gesture of reconnection.

Shortlisted for the Fortnum & Mason Food Book Award

‘Extraordinary’ TELEGRAPH ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

'Delightful' GUARDIAN

'Bee Wilson is one of my favourite writers and this may be her best book' CHRIS VAN TULLEKEN

This strikingly original account from award-winning food writer Bee Wilson charts how everyday objects take on deeply personal meanings in all our lives.

One ordinary day, the tin in which Bee Wilson baked her wedding cake fell to the ground at her feet. This should have been unremarkable, except that her marriage had just ended.

Unsettled by her own feelings about the heart-shaped tin, Wilson begins a search for others who have attached strong and even magical meanings to kitchen objects. She meets people who deal with grief or pain by projecting emotions onto certain objects, whether it is a beloved parent’s salt shaker, a cracked pasta bowl or an inherited china dinner service. Remembering her own mother, a dementia sufferer, she explores the ways that both of them have been haunted by deciding which kitchen utensils to hold on to and which to get rid of when you think you are losing your mind.

Looking to different continents, cultures and civilisations to investigate the full scope of this phenomenon, Wilson blends her own experiences with a series of touching personal stories that reflect the irrational and fundamentally human urge to keep mementos. Why would a man trapped in a concentration camp decide to make a spoon for himself? Why do some people hoard? What do gifts mean? How do we decide what is junk and what is treasure? We see firsthand how objects can contain hidden symbols, keep the past alive and even become powerful symbols of identity and resistance; from a child’s first plate to a refugee’s rescued vegetable corers.

Thoughtful, tender and beautifully written, The Heart-Shaped Tin is a moving examination of love, loss, broken cups and the legacy of things we all leave behind.

‘With candour and intelligence, Wilson highlights how the props of domestic life become markers of the progress of our lives, but more movingly she probes that it’s possible to recover from heartache with gusto’ The Times & Sunday Times Books of the Year 2025

‘Fascinating and also tender’ Diana Henry

‘This beautifully written book about the deep significance of certain objects in our kitchen – is nothing less than an intense, compassionate expression of the human condition … Both intimate and expansive, The Heart-Shaped Tin is a book I know I’ll give, urgently and importantly, to those I love’ Nigella Lawson

‘Very few food writers can do what Bee does. It made me think again – and with more tenderness – about the kitchen objects that I ordinarily take for granted. These are the human stories embedded in our material culture, and Bee brings them effortlessly to life’ Ruby Tandoh

'Heart-wrenching and heart-warming in equal measure. No one is so good at capturing the everyday magic of kitchens, cooking and life as Bee Wilson' Letitia Clark

‘Bee Wilson has changed the landscape of the kitchen by breathing life into ordinary objects. Through this remarkable book you will find yourself discovering meaning in plates, sadness in spoons, love in a measuring cup. I want to give this book to every cook I know’ Ruth Reichl

'A moving and fascinating exploration of the vital role played by household objects in our love of home and family' Sophie Hannah

Our global food system lies in the tight grip of a handful of powerful players who are prioritising profit at any cost – despite rising obesity, ill-health and a worsening climate crisis – aided by governments who are letting them get away with it.

Stuart Gillespie, a veteran of four decades at the frontline of global food policy, reveals how we can transform it into a system that can nourish all of us, as well as the planet we live on. Both unflinching exposé and revolutionary call to arms, Food Fight maps a way towards a new system and reveals the solutions within our grasp.

In this fascinating journey into culinary history James Winter provides the answers to these questions and explores the origins of classic dishes from around the world. Who came up with them? When and what inspired them to combine certain ingredients? And why have they endured to become classics that we turn to again and again?

Discover the story behind 50 classic recipes, from Battenberg Cake and Peach Melba to Sole Veronique, Chicken Kiev and Bloody Mary. Who Put The Beef into Wellington? includes the quintessential version of each recipe plus hints and tips from top chefs, this book will inform, inspire and tantalise your tastebuds in equal measure.

Content includes:

– Light bites: Caesar Salad, Eggs Benedict, Coronation Chicken and Oysters Rockefeller
– Mains: Lamb Balti, Woolton Pie, Steak Diane and Pizza Margherita
– Something Sweet: Peach Melba, Baked Alaska, Bananas Foster and Opera Cake
– And to Drink: Margarita, Tom Collins, Mint Julep and Negroni

If you are what you eat, what does that make you? Virtuous, cool, immortal? Or deviant, pitiful, ill? Is it useful to make these judgements? Do they help us improve our lives?

In a world where it feels as though the value of your life can be gauged by the goodness in your dinner, it is possible, even easy, to lose the will to live. This became particularly obvious to writer Amber Husain when suddenly, despite almost thirty years of practice, it seemed she had forgotten how to eat.

Medical wisdom tries fix the problem non-eater by teaching them the rules of Good Diet. But what if the problem is precisely the narrowing of life to questions of personal goodness? Suspecting there might be more to her stand-off with food than matters of identity and diet, Husain embarked on an enquiry into the special role of eating in our relationship with the world.

Combining a personal account of modern eating-disorder treatments, from the disturbing to the sublime, with a sprawling collective history of eating in hard times, Tell Me How You Eat unearths the astonishing effect of how we feed ourselves and others, not just on who we are, but on how we perceive our own political power. In doing so, it marks a bold and inspiring confrontation with our very understanding of food.

‘A true inspiration on every level’ ANGELA HARTNETT OBE
‘As morally urgent as it is beautifully written’ JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER
‘Vital and marvellous’ JEREMY LEE

When world-class chef Pam first opened Inver, her restaurant on the shores of Loch Fyne, she set out to discover what makes ‘modern Scottish food’ – or if it even existed.

Between Two Waters traces Pam’s journey to answer that question. From the soil to the kitchen, she interrogates the unconscious influences on what we eat and captures with real heart all that the dinner table has to offer us: sustenance, both physical and imaginative, challenges and adventure and, most importantly, communion with others. This is a blisteringly original work from one of the world’s most innovative thinkers about food, sustainability and landscape.