Sometimes cookbooks aren't just cookbooks. Exquisitely designed, beautifully written and featuring mouth-watering photography, this gorgeous tome from Guardian columnist and award-winning food writer Rachel Roddy is perfect for pasta lovers!

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 100 essential pasta and pasta sauce recipes.

Along with the recipes are short essays that 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 a by machine; the long and the short; the rolled and the stretched; the twisted and the stuffed; the fresh and the dried. The A-Z of Pasta tells you how to match pasta shapes with sauces, and how to serve them. The recipes range from the familiar - pesto, ragu and carbonara - to the unfamiliar (but thrilling).