Abigail Owen is the #1 New York Times and #1 USA Today bestselling author of 30+ books that range from upper YA (18+) epic romantasy to new adult modern mythic romantasy to super spicy adult paranormal romance. She loves magical worlds with plots that move hot and fast, feisty heroines with sass, heroes with heart, a dash of snark, and oodles of HEAs! Other titles include: wife, mother, Star Wars geek, ex-competitive skydiver, AuDHD, spreadsheet lover, Jeopardy! fanatic, organizational guru, true classic movie buff, linguaphile, wishful world traveller, and chocoholic. Abigail currently resides in Austin, Texas, with her own swoon-worthy hero, their (mostly) angelic teenagers, and an adorable fur baby. abigailowen.com

Abigail Owen

Abigail Ulman was born and raised in Melbourne. She has a BA in Creative Arts from the University of Melbourne/VCA and was a recent Wallace Stegner Fellow in Fiction at Stanford University. This is her first book.

Abigail Ulman

Abilio Estévez

Abir Mukherjee is the bestselling author of the award-winning Wyndham &amp; Banerjee series of crime novels set in 1920s India and the British Book Awards Crime Thriller of the Year 2025 Hunted. His books have been translated into sixteen languages and won various awards including the CWA Dagger for best Historical Novel, the Prix du Polar Européen, and the Wilbur Smith Award for Adventure Writing. 
 
 
He also co-hosts the popular Red Hot Chilli Writers podcast which takes a wry look at the world of books, writing, and the creative arts, tackling everything from bestsellers to pop culture. Abir grew up in Scotland and now lives in Surrey with his wife and two sons. 
 
 
Website: abirmukherjee.com Twitter, Threads &amp; Instagram: @radiomukhers Facebook: AuthorAbir

Abir Mukherjee

Abolqasem Ferdowsi

Abraham Lincoln

Abraham L. Newman is a professor at the School of Foreign Service and Government Department at Georgetown University. He is a 2022-2023 Berlin Prize winner and his work has been published in leading outlets like The New York Times, The Financial Times, The Washington Post, Nature, Science, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Harvard Business Review, and Politico.

Abraham Newman

Abraham Verghese

Absolut Vodka

Ad Putter

Ada Moncrieff is the author of Murder Most Festive, Murder at the Theatre Royale and Murder at Maybridge Castle. She lives and works in London.

Ada Moncrieff

Adam Aleksic is a linguist and content creator posting educational videos as the “Etymology Nerd” to an audience of over three million. As a linguistics student at Harvard College, he founded and served as president of the Harvard Undergraduate Linguistics Society. He’s discussed online language on NPR, repeatedly contributed to The Washington Post, and his work has been mentioned in The New York Times, The Economist, and The Guardian. He’s lectured on language and social media at Stanford, Yale, Georgetown, and other top universities, including a TEDx talk at the University of Pennsylvania. Adam is based in New York City, where he spends a lot of time scrolling TikTok for “research.”

Adam Aleksic

Adam Alter is an Associate Professor at New York University's Stern School of Business, and holds an affiliated appointment within the Psychology Department. He is the author of the New York Times bestseller Drunk Tank Pink: And Other Unexpected Forces That Shape How We Think, Feel and Behave and has written for The New York Times, New Yorker, Atlantic, Wired, Popular Science and numerous other publications.

Adam Alter

Professor Adam Balen is lead clinician at one of the UK's largest and most successful IVF units at Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust. In recognition of his research on fertility and related conditions, he holds a DSc (the highest academic degree in medicine) from the University of Leeds. Adam is internationally renowned, holding roles with the World Health Organisation (WHO), the International Federation of Gyneacology and Obstetrics (FIGO) and the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gyneacologists (RCOG). He runs both NHS and private fertility clinics so he understands the issues that arise from both sides and he works closely with fertility patient support organisations across the UK. Adam regularly features in the media on all aspects of reproductive health and lectures widely throughout the world.

Adam Balen

Adam Baron

Adam Bornstein

Adam Brookes grew up in the UK and was a journalist with BBC News for many years. As a foreign correspondent he was based in Indonesia, China and the United States. Along the way he reported from many other countries, including Iraq, Afghanistan and North Korea. He lives in Washington DC.

Adam Brookes

Adam Buxton

Adam Byatt

Adam Christopher is the New York Times bestselling author of Star Wars: Shadow of the Sith and Stranger Things: Darkness on the Edge of Town. He has also written official tie-in novels for the hit CBS television show Elementary and the award-winning Dishonored video game franchise. Co-creator of the twenty-first-century incarnation of Archie Comics superhero The Shield, Adam has also written for the universes of Doctor Who and World of Warcraft, and is a contributor to the internationally bestselling Star Wars: From a Certain Point of View anniversary anthology series and the all-ages Star Wars Adventures comic. Adam’s original novels include Made to Kill and The Burning Dark, among many others, and his debut novel Empire State was both a SciFi Now and Financial Times book of the year.

Adam Christopher

Adam Foulds's most recent books are In the Wolf’s Mouth, The Quickening Maze, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Encore Award and the European Union Prize for Literature, and The Broken Word, which won the Costa Poetry Award and the Somerset Maugham Award. He has recently been awarded the E.M. Forster Award by the American Academy of Arts and Letters and named as one of Granta’s ‘Best of Young British Novelists’.

Adam Foulds

Dr Adam Fox is a highly qualified and respected allergy specialist and consultant paediatric allergist and clinical lead for Allergy at Guy's &amp; St Thomas' Hospitals. The Times recently named him as one of Britain's top 100 children’s doctors. 
 
www.allergyfreebabyandtoddler.com

Adam Fox

Adam Frost

Adam Galinsky is currently the Morris and Alice Kaplan Professor of Ethics and Decision in Management at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. He received his PhD from Princeton University in Social Psychology and his B.A. from Harvard University.

Adam Galinsky

Adam Glasser

Adam Goodfellow

Adam Goodwin

Adam Grant is an organizational psychologist at The Wharton School, where he has been the top-rated professor for seven straight years. His books have sold millions of copies, his TED talks have been viewed more than thirty-five million times, and he hosts the hit podcast Re:Thinking. His pioneering research has challenged widespread assumptions about motivation, success, character, and change, and his viral piece on languishing was the most-read New York Times article of 2021 and the most-saved article across platforms. He has been recognized as the world’s number-two most influential management thinker and one of Fortune’s 40 Under 40, and he has received distinguished scientific achievement awards from the American Psychological Association and the National Science Foundation. Grant received his B.A. from Harvard University and his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, and he is a former Junior Olympic springboard diver and magician. He lives in Philadelphia with his wife, Allison Sweet Grant, a novelist and poet; their two cats (who don’t get along); and their three children (who mostly do).

Adam Grant

Adam and Charlotte met in Zanzibar while working with Voluntary Services Overseas. Upon their return to the UK, Charlotte completed an MA at Oxford Brookes and started her career in publishing. Adam in the meantime became writer-in-residence at the Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre before co-founding Storytelling Schools, an international organisation dedicated to training teachers in oracy, literacy and creativity. Adam and Charlotte's first book together was the best-selling and award-winning Spaghetti with the Yeti. Since then, Adam and Charlotte have continued to follow their passion for creating engaging books that inspire interaction and creativity in young readers.

Adam Guillain

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Bill Bryson

‘I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to’ 
 
And, as soon as Bill Bryson was old enough, he left. Des Moines couldn’t hold him, but it did lure him back. After ten years in England, he returned to the land of his youth, and drove almost 14,000 miles in search of a mythical small town called Amalgam, the kind of trim and sunny place where the films of his youth were set. Instead, his search led him to Anywhere, USA; a lookalike strip of gas stations, motels and hamburger outlets populated by lookalike people with a penchant for synthetic fibres. He discovered a continent that was doubly lost; lost to itself because blighted by greed, pollution, mobile homes and television; lost to him because he had become a stranger in his own land. 
 
Bryson’s acclaimed first success, The Lost Continent is a classic of travel literature – hilariously, stomach-achingly, funny, yet tinged with heartache – and the book that first staked Bill Bryson’s claim as the most beloved writer of his generation.

The Lost Continent

Travels in Small-Town America

Chris Bryant

Over the last two hundred years Parliament has witnessed and effected dramatic and often turbulent change. Political parties rose – and fell. The old aristocratic order passed away. The vote was won for the working classes and, eventually, for women. The world was torn apart by two extraordinarily bloody wars. And individual politicians were cheered for their altruism or their bravery and jeered for their sexual or financial misdemeanours. 
This second volume of Chris Bryant’s majestic Parliament: The Biography has a cast of characters that includes some of British history’s most famous names: the Duke of Wellington, Sir Robert Peel, Gladstone, Disraeli, Lloyd George, Churchill and Thatcher. Its recurring theme is reform and innovation, but it also lays bare obsessive respect for the past and a dedication to evolution rather than revolution, which has left us with a fudged constitution still perilously dependent on custom, convention and gentlemen’s agreements. 
This is riveting, flawlessly researched and accessible popular history for anyone with an interest in why modern Britain is the nation it is today.

Parliament: The Biography (Volume II - Reform)

Jim Al-Khalili

Johnjoe McFadden

Life is the most extraordinary phenomenon in the known universe; but how does it work? Even in this age of cloning and synthetic biology, the remarkable truth remains: nobody has ever made anything living entirely out of dead material. Life remains the only way to make life. Are we missing a vital ingredient in its creation? 
 
 Like Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, which provided a new perspective on evolution, Life on the Edge alters our understanding of life's dynamics as Jim Al-Khalili and Johnjoe Macfadden reveal the hitherto missing ingredient to be quantum mechanics. Drawing on recent ground-breaking experiments around the world, they show how photosynthesis relies on subatomic particles existing in many places at once, while inside enzymes, those workhorses of life that make every molecule within our cells, particles vanish from one point in space and instantly materialize in another. 
 
 Each chapter in Life on the Edge opens with an engaging example that illustrates one of life’s puzzles – How do migrating birds know where to go? How do we really smell the scent of a rose? How do our genes manage to copy themselves with such precision? – and then reveals how quantum mechanics delivers its answer. Guiding the reader through the maze of rapidly unfolding discovery, Al-Khalili and McFadden communicate vividly the excitement of this explosive new field of quantum biology, with its potentially revolutionary applications, and also offer insights into the biggest puzzle of all: what is life?

Life on the Edge

The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology

Sam Harris

'An extraordinary book . . . It will shake up your most fundamental beliefs about everyday experience, and it just might change your life.' Paul Bloom 
___ 
 
For the millions of people who want spirituality without religion, Sam Harris's new book is a guide to meditation as a rational spiritual practice informed by neuroscience and psychology. 
 
 Throughout the book, Harris argues that there are important truths to be found in the experience of contemplatives such as Jesus, Buddha and other saints and sages of history-and, therefore, that there is more to understanding reality than science and secular culture generally allow. 
 
Waking Up is part seeker's memoir and part exploration of the scientific underpinnings of spirituality. No other book marries contemplative wisdom and modern science in this way, and no author other than Sam Harris-a scientist, philosopher, and famous sceptic-could write it. 
 ___ 
 
'A demanding, illusion-shattering book.' Kirkus Reviews 
'A pleasure to read.' Huffington Post

Waking Up

Searching for Spirituality Without Religion

In the company of his friend Stephen Katz (last seen in the bestselling Neither Here nor There), Bill Bryson set off to hike the Appalachian Trail, the longest continuous footpath in the world. Ahead lay almost 2,200 miles of remote mountain wilderness filled with bears, moose, bobcats, rattlesnakes, poisonous plants, disease-bearing tics, the occasional chuckling murderer and - perhaps most alarming of all - people whose favourite pastime is discussing the relative merits of the external-frame backpack. 
 
Facing savage weather, merciless insects, unreliable maps and a fickle companion whose profoundest wish was to go to a motel and watch The X-Files, Bryson gamely struggled through the wilderness to achieve a lifetime's ambition - not to die outdoors.

A Walk In The Woods

The World's Funniest Travel Writer Takes a Hike

In 1995, before leaving his much-loved home in North Yorkshire to move back to the States for a few years with his family, Bill Bryson insisted on taking one last trip around Britain, a sort of valedictory tour of the green and kindly island that had so long been his home. His aim was to take stock of the nation's public face and private parts (as it were), and to analyse what precisely it was he loved so much about a country that had produced Marmite; a military hero whose dying wish was to be kissed by a fellow named Hardy; place names like Farleigh Wallop, Titsey and Shellow Bowells; people who said 'Mustn't grumble', and ‘Ooh lovely’ at the sight of a cup of tea and a plate of biscuits; and Gardeners' Question Time. Notes from a Small Island was a huge number-one bestseller when it was first published, and has become the nation's most loved book about Britain, going on to sell over two million copies.

Notes From A Small Island

Journey Through Britain

Miranda Innes

In 1996, former Country Living garden editor Miranda Innes decided to change her life completely. 
 
Tired of urban living, bored of her career, out of love with her long-standing partner, she and her son spied a romantic ruin in Andalusia amid its own olive groves, and made an offer. What happened next - selling her London house, and handing in her notice at the magazine - was going to be straightforward, or so she thought. She had not counted on the sudden emergence of a New Man in her life, the plans of Arsenal football ground to purchase her back garden, a badly slipped disc and the logistics involved in moving a lifetime's possessions. Nor had she realised what a struggle re-building the house, room by room, or planting a garden in the hostile terrain of southern Spain would be. But helped by her new husband, Dan, and an assortment of eccentric locals, not least by the worldly wisdom of Juan the builder, she made it, and over the ensuing four years, the house and pool were built and the garden began to take shape. 
 
This is the story of how Miranda got to mañana, of her love affair with Spain, and a countryside where 'great jagged peaks range above little fields, white villages tumble like sugar cubes down the sides of hills, and white houses grow room by room in a puzzle of rectangles, topped by corrugated cinnamon-brown terracotta tiles moulded on a man's thigh'. 
 
Illustrated throughout with line-drawings by Dan Pearce, Getting to Mañana is a book to read and treasure.

Getting To Manana

Michael Tierney

In the early winter of 1983, a generous season for memories, Michael Tierney attended his first - and only - game with his father, John. For a self-employed electrician with nine children to support, this was the rarest of opportunities. Miraculously, Celtic overturned a first-leg deficit to thrash Sporting Lisbon, 5-0, with a team of home-grown talent, players that felt as one with the fans. 
 
As the years pass, that one magical evening fades in the bustle of family commitments and the constant spectre of unemployment. Then, in 2002, John Tierney has a severe stroke that renders him immobile and unable to talk. For his wife Catherine, for Michael and his five sisters and three brothers, the landscape of life would change irrevocably. But three decades later, Michael and his wheelchair-bound parent would make an emotional return to Celtic Park. 
 
The First Game with My Father is an evocative family memoir and a journey of discovery into lives that diverge, yet are knitted together by moments of sorrow and joy, and into the nature of identity, especially when tragedy renders a man voiceless. The most intimate portrait of a father and son and how a football team unites them in an unbreakable bond, it is also the story of a city, a community, and a treasured way of life.

The First Game with My Father

Stephen Clarke

NEW UPDATED EDITION 
 
 Was the Battle of Hastings a French victory? 
Non! William the Conqueror was Norman and hated the French. 
 
Were the Brits really responsible for the death of Joan of Arc? 
Non! The French sentenced her to death for wearing trousers. 
 
Did the French write "God Save the Queen"? 
Non! But that's what they claim. 
 
Ten centuries' worth of French historical 'facts' bite the dust as Stephen Clarke looks at what has really been going on since 1066 ... 
 
Featuring new annoyances – both historical and recent – inflicted on the French, including Napoleon's "banned" chamber pot, Louis XIV's painful operation, Anglo-French jibes during the 2012 London Olympics, French niggles about William and Kate's royal wedding, and much more ...

1000 Years of Annoying the French

Brian Masters

Born of a preoccupation with saints and sinners, The Evil That Men Do is Brian Masters' investigation into the nature of good and evil, and the different ways in which they can be manifested. It examines the fundamental questions of why we are as we are: why we are good, why we care for one another, why we can be altruistic and kind as well as selfish and cruel. 
 
According to science, we are prisoners of our genetic inheritance. Are our impulses therefore to some extent inescapable, compelling us to behave in a certain manner, irrespective of the guidelines imposed by instinct or civilization? Or can we determine our individual patterns of behaviour? Do we really have a choice? 
 
Using a diverse multitude of examples, from St. Francis of Assisi, Audrey Hepburn, Bruce Chatwin and Bob Geldof to the Marquis de Sade, Adolf Hitler and Peter Sutcliffe, from the Spanish Inquisition to Nazi Germany to the Vietnam War, Brian Masters examines this age-old yet intensely contemporary subject. At a time when civilization seems on the verge of meltdown, he has produced an incisive, thoughtful and provocative meditation on a fundamental human question.

The Evil That Men Do

The history of Parliament is the history of the United Kingdom itself. It has a cast of thousands. Some were ambitious, visionary and altruistic. Others were hot-headed, violent and self-serving. Few were unambiguously noble. Yet their rowdy confrontations, their campaigning zeal and their unstable alliances framed our nation. 
 
This first of two volumes takes us on a 500-year journey from Parliament's earliest days in the thirteenth century through the turbulent years of the Wars of the Roses and the upheavals of the Civil Wars, and up to 1801, when Parliament – and the United Kingdom, embracing Scotland and Ireland – emerged in a modern form. 
 
Chris Bryant tells this epic tale through the lives of the myriad MPs, lords and bishops who passed through Parliament. It is the vivid, colourful biography of a cast of characters whose passions and obsessions, strengths and weaknesses laid the foundations of modern democracy.

Parliament: The Biography (Volume I - Ancestral Voices)

John Lewis-Stempel

_________________ 
 
'BRITAIN'S FINEST LIVING NATURE WRITER' - THE TIMES 
 
WINNER OF THE THWAITES WAINWRIGHT PRIZE 2015 
 
What really goes on in the long grass? 
 
Meadowland gives an unique and intimate account of an English meadow’s life from January to December, together with its biography. In exquisite prose, John Lewis-Stempel records the passage of the seasons from cowslips in spring to the hay-cutting of summer and grazing in autumn, and includes the biographies of the animals that inhabit the grass and the soil beneath: the badger clan, the fox family, the rabbit warren,the skylark brood and the curlew pair, among others. Their births, lives, and deaths are stories that thread through the book from first page to last.

Meadowland

the private life of an English field

Sam Kean

For centuries, scientists had only one way to study the brain: wait for misfortune to strike - strokes, seizures, infections, lobotomies, horrendous accidents, phantom limbs, Siamese twins - and see how the victims changed afterwards. In many cases their survival was miraculous, and observers marvelled at the transformations that took place when different parts of the brain were destroyed. Parents suddenly couldn't recognise their children. Pillars of the community became pathological liars and paedophiles. Some people couldn't speak but could still sing. Others couldn't read but could write. 
The stories of these people laid the foundations of modern neuroscience and, century by century, key cases taught scientists what every last region of the brain did. With lucid explanations and incisive wit, Sam Kean explores the brain's secret passageways and recounts the forgotten tales of the ordinary individuals whose struggles, resilience and deep humanity made neuroscience possible.

The Tale of the Duelling Neurosurgeons

The History of the Human Brain as Revealed by True Stories of Trauma, Madness, and Recovery

Abbie Ross

In 1972 Abbie Ross’s cosmopolitan parents move the family from London to rural North Wales, exchanging a town house in Islington for a remote farmhouse on a hill. 
Abbie’s Liverpudlian grandparents – dedicated followers of Liberace, sleek in scented mohair and patent leather – are sure they’ve lost their minds. For Abbie, though, the only cloud on the horizon is the nearby hippy commune and its inhabitants. There are worrying signs that this is the sort of ‘better life’ that her parents have in mind. 
Brilliantly evoking a particular time and place, Abbie’s memoir re-creates a world of dens and pineapple chunks, of John Craven’s Newsround and fishing for sticklebacks – and the joy but also the burning powerlessness of being a child. Disgusted by her father’s ‘yogic flying’ and her mother’s taste for brown bread and billowing cheesecloth (with no bra), Abbie is desperate not to be different. Far better, she thinks, to fit in with shouting, pathologically nosy Sara across the fields,or stay close to Philip next door – paralysingly shy and with a preference for orange food and no trousers (‘nice to have a bit of air’) ... 
Rich with detail that reveals a whole world, Hippy Dinners is very funny and full of heart. It is also a delicate and astute portrait of the brutal realities of ‘a simple life’.

Hippy Dinners

A memoir of a rural childhood

David Belton

'Tremendous. A moving and haunting tribute to the human spirit' WILLIAM BOYD 
 
Into the heart of a genocide that left a million people dead 
 
6 April 1994: In the skies above Rwanda the president’s plane is shot down in flames. 
 
Near Kigali, Jean-Pierre holds his family close, fearing for their lives as the violence escalates. 
 
 In the chapel of a hillside village, missionary priest Vjeko Curic prepares to save thousands of lives 
 
The mass slaughter that follows – friends against friends, neighbours against neighbours - is one of the bloodiest chapters in history 
 
 
Twenty years on, BBC Newsnight producer David Belton, one of the first journalists into Rwanda, tells of the horrors he experienced at first-hand. Now following the threads of Jean-Pierre and Vjeko Curic’s stories, he revisits a country still marked with blood, in search of those who survived and the legacy of those who did not. This is David Belton's quest for the limits of bravery and forgiveness.

When The Hills Ask For Your Blood: A Personal Story of Genocide and Rwanda

Tom Cox

Peter's mum and dad are worried. Over the last twelve months they've noticed ferocious changes taking place in their son. It's not just the mumbling and the cloud of melancholy that seems to hover permanently over his ever-more-militant mop of curly hair. It's not even the oversized trousers or the numerous metal chains that hang off them. The problem is that Peter, who is fourteen, wants to be a musician - a rock star preferably, but anything else that involves a guitar, gets him bags of money and free CDs, and gives him access to unlimited scantily clad groupies will suffice (as long as it's not classical). Uncoincidentally, ever since the advent of this new ambition, Peter's grades at school have plummeted from very good to somewhere below mediocre. What is to be done? 
In the spirit of intellectual enquiry, Peter and music-critic, Tom Cox, set off in a Ford Focus on a journey to the dark heart of Britain's musical heritage, to get the inside track on whether being a musician really is a sensible career choice for a teenager. They hunt the streets of Cambridge for former Pink Floyd frontman Syd Barrett and have numerous encounters with folkies in tights. They explore the wilder shores of prog rock and get up close and personal in a lift with Brian Wilson. Tom gives a masterclass in second-hand-record-shop etiquette and finds that Peter is something of a child prodigy. Most of all, they drive around, talk about stuff and Peter eats crisps. 
 
Part coming-of-age story and part urban travelogue, this brilliantly funny book is a must for anyone who has ever been baffled by a teenage boy.

Educating Peter

Anya von Bremzen

Born in a surreal Moscow communal apartment where eighteen families shared one kitchen, Anya von Bremzen grew up singing odes to Lenin, black-marketeering Juicy Fruit gum at school, and longing for a taste of the mythical West. It was a life by turns absurd, drab, naively joyous, melancholy and, finally, intolerable. In 1974, when Anya was ten, she and her mother fled to the USA, with no winter coats and no right of return. These days, Anya is the doyenne of high-end food writing. And yet, the flavour of Soviet kolbasa, like Proust's madeleine, transports her back to that vanished Atlantis known as the USSR . 
 
In this sweeping, tragicomic memoir, Anya recreates seven decades of the Soviet experience through cooking and food, and reconstructs a moving family history spanning three generations. Her narrative is embedded in a larger historical epic: Lenin's bloody grain requisitioning, World War II starvation, Stalin's table manners, Khrushchev's kitchen debates, Gorbachev's disastrous anti-alcohol policies and the ultimate collapse of the USSR. And all of this is bound together by Anya's sardonic wit, passionate nostalgia and piercing observations. Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking is a book that stirs the soul as well as the senses.

Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking

Giovanni Frazzetto

What can a brain scan, or our reaction to a Caravaggio painting, reveal about the deep seat of guilt? 
 
How can reading Heidegger, or conducting experiments on rats, help us to cope with anxiety in the face of the world's economic crisis? 
 
Can ancient remedies fight sadness more effectively than anti-depressants? 
 
What does the neuroscience of acting tell us about how we feel empathy, and fall for an actor on stage? 
 
What can writing poetry tell us about how joy works? 
 
And how can a bizarre neurological syndrome or a Shakespearean sonnet explain love and intimacy? 
 
We live at a time when neuroscience is unlocking the secrets of our emotions. But is science ever enough to explain why we feel the way we feel? 
 
Giovanni Frazzetto takes us on a journey through our everyday lives and most common emotions. In each chapter, his scientific knowledge mixes with personal experience to offer a compelling account of the continual contrast between rationality and sentiment, science and poetry. And he shows us that by facing this contrast, we can more fully understand ourselves and how we feel.

How We Feel

In summer 1927, America had a booming stock market, a president who worked just four hours a day (and slept much of the rest), a devastating flood of the Mississippi, a sensational murder trial, and an unknown aviator named Charles Lindbergh who became the most famous man on earth. 
 
It was the summer that saw the birth of talking pictures, the invention of television, the peak of Al Capone’s reign of terror, the horrifying bombing of a school in Michigan, the thrillingly improbable return to greatness of over-the-hill baseball player Babe Ruth, and an almost impossible amount more. 
 
In this hugely entertaining book, Bill Bryson spins a tale of brawling adventure, reckless optimism and delirious energy. With the trademark brio, wit and authority that make him Britain’s favourite writer of narrative non-fiction, he brings to life a forgotten summer when America came of age, took centre stage, and changed the world.

One Summer

America 1927

Richard Dawkins

Born to parents who were enthusiastic naturalists, and linked through his wider family to a clutch of accomplished scientists, Richard Dawkins was bound to have biology in his genes. But what were the influences that shaped his life? And who inspired him to become the pioneering scientist and public thinker now famous (and infamous to some) around the world? 
 
In An Appetite for Wonder we join him on a personal journey from an enchanting childhood in colonial Africa, through the eccentricities of boarding school in England, to his studies at the University of Oxford’s dynamic Zoology Department, which sparked his radical new vision of Darwinism, The Selfish Gene. Through Dawkins’s honest self-reflection, touching reminiscences and witty anecdotes, we are finally able to understand the private influences that shaped the public man who, more than anyone else in his generation, explained our own origins.

An Appetite For Wonder: The Making of a Scientist

Lucy Dent

At the curtain call of her thirties, Lucy Dent finds herself in a marriage where meaningful communication, sexual contact and friendship have all but disappeared. Craving comfort and attention, she turns to the internet to find companionship and finds fulfilment in online sexual liaisons. 
 
Lucy details her sexual encounters with searing honesty - but this book is so much more than a 'sex memoir'. It explores marital disharmony, loneliness, addiction and the ramifications of making the choice not to have children. In an age in which lives are played out via social networks, this compelling book exposes how the supposed security of online interaction doesn't, in fact, stay safe for very long.

Turned On

Brian Castner

Brian Castner served three tours of duty in the Middle East, two of them as the commander of an Explosive Ordnance Disposal unit in Iraq. He and his team – his brothers – disarmed bombs. Sometimes they used robots and remote controls. Sometimes they set off controlled explosions. Sometimes one of the team would have to put on the eighty-pound Kevlar suit, take the Long Walk, and disarm the device by hand. Often they were simply too late; arriving just in time to pick up the pieces. 
 
In a hailstorm of bullets, bomb fragments, body parts and the endless wailing of innocent civilians, the days rolled into nights, yesterday turned into tomorrow, and today never even happened. But after the tour, the celebrations and the long plane ride home, the real war was just beginning. The war against the fear, the confusion, the guilt and the memory loss. The war against the Crazy. 
 
This exhilarating, heartbreaking, searingly honest memoir exposes two harrowing and simultaneous realities: the terror, excitement and camaraderie of combat, and the lonely battle against the enemy within.

The Long Walk

A Story of War and the Life That Follows

Edward Stourton

The mountain paths are as treacherous as they are steep – the more so in the dark and in winter. Even for the fit the journey is a formidable challenge. Hundreds of those who climbed through the Pyrenees during the Second World War were malnourished and exhausted after weeks on the run hiding in barns and attics. Many never even reached the Spanish border. 
 
Today their bravery and endurance is commemorated each July by a trek along the Chemin de la Liberté – the toughest and most dangerous of wartime routes. From his fellow pilgrims Edward Stourton uncovers stories of midnight scrambles across rooftops and drops from speeding trains; burning Lancasters, doomed love affairs, horrific murder and astonishing heroism. 
 
The lives of the men, women and children who were drawn by the war to the Pyrenees often read as breathtakingly exciting adventure, but they were led against a background of intense fear, mounting persecution and appalling risk. Drawing on interviews with the few remaining survivors and the families of those who were there, Edward Stourton’s vivid history of this little-known aspect of the Second World War is shocking, dramatic and intensely moving.

Cruel Crossing

Escaping Hitler Across the Pyrenees

James Fergusson

SHORTLISTED FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE 2014 AND THE PADDY POWER POLITICAL BOOK AWARDS INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS BOOK OF THE YEAR. 
 
Award-winning journalist James Fergusson is among the few to have witnessed at first hand the devastating reality of life in the failed and desperate state of Somalia. 
 
This corner of the world has long been seen as the rotting and charred heart of Africa: a melting pot of crime, corruption, poverty, famine and civil war. And in recent years, whilst Somalia’s lucrative piracy industry has grabbed the headlines, a darker, much deeper threat has come of age: the Al Qaida-linked militants Al Shabaab, and the dawn of a new phase in the global war on terror. 
 
Yet, paradoxically, Somalia’s star is brightening, as forms of business, law enforcement and local politics begin to establish themselves, and members of the vast Somali diaspora return to their homeland. 
 
Fergusson takes us to the heart of the struggle, meeting everyone from politicians, pirates, extremists and mercenaries to aid workers, civilians and refugees. He gives a unique account of a country ravaged by war, considers what the future might hold for a generation who have grown up knowing little else and exposes the reality of life in this hard, often forgotten land.

The World's Most Dangerous Place

Inside the Outlaw State of Somalia

Pamela Druckerman

Parenting advice from French Children Don't Throw Food, now distilled into 100 short and easy tips. 
In response to the enthusiastic reception of her bestselling parenting memoir French Children Don't Throw Food, Pamela Druckerman now offers a practical handbook that distils her findings into one hundred short and straightforward tips to bring up your child a la francaise. Includes advice about pregnancy, feeding (including meal plans and recipes from Paris creches), sleeping, manners, and more. 
'Her book should be dispensed on prescription-' - Spectator

French Parents Don't Give In

100 parenting tips from Paris

Paul Ham

Japan 1945. In one of the defining moments of the twentieth century, more than 100,000 people were killed instantly by two atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki by US Air Force B29s. Hundreds of thousands more succumbed to their horrific injuries, or slowly perished of radiation-related sickness. 
 
Hiroshima Nagasaki tells the story of the tragedy through the eyes of the survivors, from the twelve-year-olds forced to work in war factories to the wives and children who faced it alone. Through their harrowing personal testimonies, we are reminded that these were ordinary people, given no warning and no chance to escape the horror. 
 
American leaders claimed that the bombings were 'our least abhorrent choice' and fell strictly on 'military targets'. Even today, most people believe they ended the Pacific War and saved millions of American and Japanese lives. Hiroshima Nagasaki challenges this deep-set perception, revealing that the atomic bombings were the final crippling blow to the Japanese in a stratgic air war waged primarily against civilians.

Hiroshima Nagasaki

Jason Webster

As Islam and the West prepare to clash once again, Jason Webster embarks on a quest to discover Spain's hidden Moorish legacy and lift the lid on a country once forged by both Muslims and Christians. He meets Zine, a young illegal immigrant from Morocco, a twenty-first century Moor, lured over with the promise of a job but exploited as a slave labourer on a fruit farm. Jason's life is threatened as he investigates the agricultural gulag, Zine rescues him, and the unlikely pair of writer and desperado take off on a rollercoaster ride through Andalucía. 
 
While Jason unveils the neglected Arab ancestry of modern Spain - apparent in its food, language, people and culture - Zine sets out on his own parallel quest, a one-man peace mission to resolve Muslim-Christian tensions by proving irresistible to Spanish señoritas.

Andalus

Unlocking The Secrets Of Moorish Spain

Eric Clark

Toys - from teddy bears to Barbie dolls to train sets - define our image of childhood innocence. But the truth is that toys represent a $21 billion a year industry, and with so much money at stake, the toy business is anything but child's play. 
 
In The Real Toy Story, investigative journalist Eric Clark exposes the startling truths behind Britain's favourite toys. Drawing on interviews with over 200 industry insiders, Clark names and shames the corporations spending millions on research into the best way to manipulate their target audience while manufacturing products in China under virtual slave labour conditions. 
 
In a world of cut-throat competition and cold-blooded marketing, toy companies are increasingly willing to sacrifice our children in the rush for profits. And as more children forsake cuddly play things for Ipods and cell phones, companies are using even more extreme tactics- unashamedly using sex and violence to sell dolls and action men to children as young as three - to make sure that their toy is the one that children want to have. 
 
The Real Toy Story is essential reading for the millions of adults who care about the toys they choose for the children in their lives.

The Real Toy Story

Inside the Ruthless Battle for Britain's Youngest Consumers

John McCarthy

“Fascinating and timely” Jeremy Bowen 
 
 
Held hostage for many years by terrorists in Lebanon, John McCarthy is all too familiar with the pain and injustice of being denied your home. Determined to understand the day-to-day complexities of being a Palestian-Arab in modern-day Israel, he embarks on a deeply personal journey from the shores of the Mediterranean to the desert landscape of the Negev. He discovers the hidden stories of the ordinary people who must live out their lives in the shadow of a brutal conflict, and asks the vital question – how does humanity endure under such great oppression?

You Can't Hide the Sun

A Journey through Palestine

Jim Al-Khalili is about to untangle the world's greatest science conundrums... 
___________ 
 
How does the fact that it gets dark at night prove the Universe must have started with a big bang? 
 
Where are all the aliens? 
 
Why does the length of a piece of string vary depending on how fast it is moving? 
 
Our subject is 'perceived paradoxes' - questions or thought-experiments that on first encounter seem impossible to answer, but which science has been able to solve. 
 
Our tour of these mind-expanding puzzles will take us through some of the greatest hits of science - from Einstein's theories about space and time, to the latest ideas of how the quantum world works. Some of our paradoxes may be familiar, such as Schrödinger's famous cat, which is seemingly alive and dead at the same time; or the Grandfather Paradox - if you travelled back in time and killed your grandfather you would not have been born and would not therefore have killed your grandfather. Other paradoxes will be new to you, but no less bizarre and fascinating. 
 
In resolving our paradoxes we will have to travel to the furthest reaches of the Universe and explore the very essence of space and time. Hold on tight.

Paradox

The Nine Greatest Enigmas in Physics

Athenian

Atlantia

Avalon

BBC Children's Classics

BBC Classics

BBC Earth

BBC Radio’s The Lord of the Rings

BBC TV Soundtracks

BP Animation

Baby Touch

Ballroom Girls

Barnaby Grimes

Be More...

Bear Mountain Rescue Series

Beasts of Prey

The complete boxed collection of Beatrix Potter's beloved Peter Rabbit books

Beatrix Potter Originals

Beautiful Creatures

BeddyByes

Bel Dame Apocrypha

Bella Wallis Victorian Mysteries

Belle

Ben & Holly's Little Kingdom

Bergman Brothers

Big Ideas for Little Philosophers

Bill Clinton & James Patterson stand-alone thrillers

Bill Smith / Lydia Chin

Bim Blake

Bindi Babes

Tim and Biscuit, two unlikely friends, always seem to get themselves into difficult situations. From their first meeting in Cliffhanger, where bookish Tim is forced to endure an activities camp, to Buried Alive, where a quiet camping holiday turns out to be full of surprises, there is never a dull moment with these two around.Jaqueline Wilson’s hilarious duo of books catalogues their escapades, triumphs and failures, with a good helping of snacks along the way!

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