I! Have! Written! A! Book!
I! Have! Written! A! Book! For! You!
Yes, for you. Hi, hello, hi. I wrote it for you, yourself, reading this on a Saturday morning that I hope is sunny and full of peace and dappled light. Crazy! But true, actually. It’s here, my book, in case you can’t be bothered to read too many words about my feelings. (LOL. This letter is always too many words about my feelings.) You can pre-order it here and I am asking you please to do so because it is the most important thing you can give an author: a pre-order. It also makes it cheaper for you, and in the case of this particular book and this Substack, will guarantee you a very cute postcard from me personally to you, which I will post to you with my own hands, PLUS entry into at least five (?) giveaways with exceptionally nice prizes. Pre-order! Here! Or here!
This is kind of a promotional post, but really a heartfelt one, because a) I have things to say to you, specifically, reading this letter, and also b) I cry all the time these days (see: my many horses, letters passim). I am on the edge of my feelings all the time. I wrote you a book. You made it possible for me to write a book. It is the most beautiful thing I have ever made; the best work I have ever done; and you made it possible for me to do that by reading these letters. I am verklempt; I am wordless; I am trying my best; I am writing to you from a train. As I always am these days, specifically I am writing to you from this train that runs between London and the sea.
This particular train, I have just noticed, is one I have to get off in mere minutes— my relentless regime of changing at East Croydon is nothing if not relentless— just as I have plugged in my laptop and secured a seat at a table. Curses! But not too many curses as I have written AND FINISHED a book and now you can buy it.
If you like these letters, you will love this book. That is a 100%, sure-thing guarantee: it is exactly like this newsletter, but with all-new recipes, more than one hundred of them, and MATRIXES for designing recipes of your own, and also, it is even better maybe than these emails, because it has the photography of my beloved friend Yuki Sugiura (my first photo book!), and the design of Luke Bird (a maestro to whom I kept sending gravestone photos and Delft tiles and 1930s housewife manuals), and the editorial skills of publishing demon genius Louise Haines, who is also (!!!!) Nigel Slater’s editor, and listen: I am not too jaded a woman to be thrilled by that fact on a daily basis.
Also, I am not too jaded to be thrilled by getting emails from Nigel Slater about how much he likes this book. Nigel! Slater! Likes! My! Book!
When I got this particular email I was in a very bleak moment in which I thought maybe the book sucked and also that I had bought a stupid money-pit house that would never be nice and would always be wet. It was January— this January just gone!— and I was truly just despairing, pretty much, because that is what it is like writing a book. And then! Nicola Lamb! THE Anna Jones!
You can tell those people mean it because they said nice things to print on the cover, and at the time they said nice things they had only seen it in a genuinely depressing PDF. Now it is not a PDF. Now it is this book, which I think is easily the most beautiful and delicious of all my books, in any genre. I enter into a green era. The time of the blues is over! Now we have the green of grass and velvet and the Maldon salt bucket. Now we have the soft soft deep lime-wash green of my new kitchen, which is now, please God, watertight as hell. Please pre-order my book as it has cost me all my savings, every penny, to watertight this fucking kitchen.
Please pre-order my book as it has cost me every penny I have to try and make a kitchen I don’t have to leave in two years or one year or ten months.
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