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Gabriel Weston

A profound and provocative journey through the human body from the award-winning writer, broadcaster and surgeon. 
 
'Exceptional, beautiful and absolutely absorbing' CHRIS VAN TULLEKEN 
 
'A book of wonder' SARAH MOSS 
 
For Gabriel Weston, there was always something missing from the anatomy she was taught at medical school. Medicine teaches us how a body functions, but it doesn't help us navigate the reality of living in one. As she became a surgeon, a mother, and ultimately a patient herself, Weston found herself grappling with the gap between scientific knowledge and unfathomable complexity of human experience. 
 
In this captivating exploration of the body, Weston dissolves the boundaries that usually divide surgeon and patient, pushing beyond the limit of what science has to tell us about who we are. Focusing on our individual organs, not just under the intense spotlight of the operating theatre, but in the central role they play in the stories of our lives, a fuller and more human picture of our bodies emerges: more fragile, frightening and miraculous than we could have imagined. 
 
Intimate, penetrating and original, Alive is an anatomy like no other, about our bodies and bonds, the richness and brevity of existence, and the thread of mortality that connect us all.

Alive

An Alternative Anatomy

Adrian Tinniswood

Christopher Wren (1632-1723) was the greatest architect Britain has ever known. But he was more than that. A founder of the Royal Society, he mapped the moon and the stars, investigated the problem of longitude and the rings of Saturn, and carried out groundbreaking experiments into the circulation of the blood. His observations on comets, meteorology and muscular action made vital contributions to the developing ideas of Newton, Halley and Boyle. 
 
His Invention So Fertile presents the first complete picture of this towering genius: the Surveyor-General of the King's Works, running the nation's biggest architectural office and wrestling with corruption and interference; the pioneering anatomist; the mathematician, devising new navigational instruments and lecturing on planetary motion. 
 
It also shows us the man behind the legend. Wren was married and widowed twice, he fathered a mentally handicapped child, quarrelled with his colleagues and fell foul of his employers. He scrambled over building sites and went to the theatre and drank in coffee-houses. The book explores what it was like to be at Oxford during the Commonwealth, as a generation struggled to make sense of a society in chaos; it recreates the tensions which tore apart the court of James II; it brings to life the petty jealousies that formed an integral part of both the building world and scientific milieu of the Royal Society. 
 
Above all, His Invention So Fertile makes clear to the general reader and the art historian just why Wren remains a cultural icon - both a creation and a creator of the world he lived in.

His Invention So Fertile

Adam Phillips

D.W. Winnicott's remarkable books, including The Piggle, Home Is Where We Start From and The Child, Family and the Outside World (all published by Penguin) are still read, valued and argued with over thirty years after his death. Adam Phillips's short book, now issued with a new preface, is an elegant, thoughtful attempt to get to grips with a writer, paediatrician and psychiatrist whose work with children and mothers (and the wider implications their relationship has for all of us) continues to be profoundly relevant and fascinating.

Winnicott

Giorgio Parisi

The world is shaped by complexity. In this enlightening book, Nobel Prize winner Giorgio Parisi guides us through his unorthodox yet exhilarating work to show us how. It all starts with investigating the principles of physics by observing the sophisticated flight patterns of starlings. Studying the movements of these birds, he has realized, proves an illuminating way into understanding complex systems of all kinds - collections of everything from atoms to planets to other animals like ourselves. 
 
Along the way, Parisi reflects on the lessons he's taken from a life in pursuit of scientific truth: the importance of serendipity to the discovery of new ideas, the surprising kinship between physics and other fields of study and the value of science to a thriving society. In so doing, he removes the practice of science from the confines of the laboratory and brings it into the real world. Complexity is all around us - from climate to finance to biology, it offers a unique way of finding order in chaos. 
 
Part elegant scientific treatise, part thrilling intellectual journey, In a Flight of Starlings is an invitation to find wonder in the world around us.

In a Flight of Starlings

The Wonder of Complex Systems

Ian Young

Ian Young spent a summer as a medical student in a provincial maternity unit in Algeria.  This book is taken from the diary he began on arrival, when he found himself the privileged witness of the insides not just of Kabyl women, but also some much-trumpeted ideology. The immediate villains are a couple of expatriate Bulgarian gynaecologists.  Dr Vasilev, at the closing stages of a career of fathomless incompetence, forms a bond of affection with the author and they spend many hours in the office over an old route map of Bulgaria, discussing mileages and motorcycles as Maternity drifts beneath them like an abandoned ship.  Dr Kostov packs a powerful bedside punch and saves his humanitarian feelings for the health of the Deutschmark.  The two form a macabre comic team as they take the reader through a series of medical nightmares.  But their lot is scarcely more enviable than that of their female victims: the foreign doctors are the unhappy executors, working in blood, excrement and death, of the most respected attitudes in Algeria. The Private Life of Islam is a ruthlessly clear-sighted view of a particular place at a particular time.  It is also a classic in the art of story-telling.'A real achievement, personal as well as literary.' David Pryce-Jones, The Times'A parable of the reality behind a vast amount of modern social and political fantasy, even in the most developed of countries.' David Holden, Sunday Times

The Private Life Of Islam

An Algerian Diary

Benji Waterhouse

‘This is honestly my dream book… Fascinating’ FERN BRADY 
 
‘Fearlessly honest, funny and uplifting’ JO BRAND 
 
‘Very funny and deeply sympathetic. Really excellent’ HENRY MARSH 
 
Most of the psychiatric cases in this book are Benji’s patients. Some of them are his family. One of them is him. 
 
Unlocking the doors to the psych ward, NHS psychiatrist Dr Benji Waterhouse provides a fly-on-the-padded-wall account of medicine’s most mysterious and controversial speciality. 
 
Why would anyone in their right mind choose to be a psychiatrist? Are the solutions to people’s messy lives really within medical school textbooks? And how can vulnerable patients receive the care they need when psychiatry lacks staff, hospital beds and any actual cures? 
 
This is an eye-opening medical memoir – from both sides of the doctor’s desk. The perfect read for fans of This Is Going to Hurt, Unnatural Causes and The Prison Doctor.

You Don't Have to Be Mad to Work Here

A Psychiatrist’s Life

A K Benjamin

What does it take to care for a stranger? Really care. 
 
The Case for Love is a reflection on a career treating patients with brain trauma - people whose thoughts and feelings are largely unknowable - and how and why those treatments failed. 
 
It is a reconstruction of three haunting cases in which the patients were tragically misunderstood - and an attempt through the power of the imagination to understand and make amends. 
 
It then describes the author's abandonment of his career and his tumultuous quest for healing and redemption. 
 
It is also a story of intimate relationships, pets, fatherhood and heartbreak, culminating in a moment of psychedelic transcendence and rebirth. 
 
It is about the overpowering need for connection - and how, increasingly, we are trapped in ourselves. 
 
It is a meditation on empathy and an act of atonement. 
 
It is a unique, hybrid work of clinical case study and pure invention that destroys the boundary between fact and fiction in order to bring us face-to-face with the shocking, liberating truth. 
 
__________ 
 
Praise for Let Me Not Be Mad 
 
'Imagine a gonzo Oliver Sacks communing with Edward St Aubyn's Patrick Melrose, R.D. Laing and the spirit of Kafka's 'The Country Doctor', and you still won't quite have the flavour of this wild and strikingly original book' William Fiennes 
 
'Stunning: clever, troubling, restless, honest, dishonest; one of the best portraits of madness and clinical practice I've read' Olivia Laing 
 
'A perfectly extraordinary - not to mention extraordinarily perfect - tense Hitchcockian psychodrama. I have rarely read a more haunting and enthralling account of a descent into madness. An important, profound and fascinating book' Stephen Fry 
 
'Blackly comic, warmly compassionate, a unique take on the human mind offering uncomfortable universal truths' Stewart Lee 
 
'A slow-burn belter of a book ... terrific ... so finely described, the result has the terse force of a classic short story' Roddy Doyle 
 
'Exhilarating ... dazzling ... a miraculous feat' Guardian

The Case for Love

My Adventures In Other Minds

John Lewis-Stempel

Set in Glasgow in the 1930s, Young James Herriot is the fascinating story of Herriot’s formative years at veterinary college, recounting the tales behind his calling to work with animals and his early friendships. With no modern drugs, and a lot of trial-and-error, James sets about learning how to treat the local farm animals and the pets of city folk. 
 
Accompanied by a cast of eccentric professors and an ensemble of aspiring veterinarians, this book reveals a world now lost to us, showing how life in pre-war Britain changed an enthusiastic young student named Alf Wight into the man who would charm millions of readers the world over.

Young James Herriot

The Making of the World’s Most Famous Vet

Camilla Pang

WINNER OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY INSIGHT INVESTMENT SCIENCE BOOK PRIZE 2020 
 
How do we understand the people around us? How do we recognise people's motivations, their behaviour, or even their facial expressions? And, when do we learn the social cues that dictate human behaviour? 
 
Diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder at the age of eight, Camilla Pang struggled to understand the world around her and the way people worked. Desperate for a solution, Camilla asked her mother if there was an instruction manual for humans that she could consult. But, without the blueprint to life she was hoping for, Camilla began to create her own. Now armed with a PhD in biochemistry, Camilla dismantles our obscure social customs and identifies what it really means to be human using her unique expertise and a language she knows best: science. 
 
Through a set of scientific principles, this book examines life's everyday interactions including: 
 
- Decisions and the route we take to make them; 
- Conflict and how we can avoid it; 
- Relationships and how we establish them; 
- Etiquette and how we conform to it. 
 
Explaining Humans is an original and incisive exploration of human nature and the strangeness of social norms, written from the outside looking in. Camilla's unique perspective of the world, in turn, tells us so much about ourselves - about who we are and why we do it - and is a fascinating guide on how to lead a more connected, happier life. 
_____________ 
 
'Unveiling hidden complexities of human behaviour, this book navigates a mind-bending topic with incisiveness and lucidity' David Lammy, Labor MP for Tottenham, author of Tribes

Explaining Humans

What Science Can Teach Us About Life, Love and Relationships

Janet Browne

Few lives of great men offer so much interest - and so many mysteries - as the life of Charles Darwin, the greatest figure of nineteenth-century science, whose ideas are still inspiring discoveries and controversies more than 100 years after his death. Yet, only with the publication of Voyaging, the first volume of this acclaimed biography, do we have a truly vivid and comprehensive picture of Darwin as a man and a scientist. 
 
The second and final volume of Janet Browne's biography of Darwin - The Power of Place - is also available from Pimlico.

Charles Darwin: Voyaging

Volume 1 of a biography

Charles Darwin

The Autobiographies of Charles Darwin (1809-82) provide a fascinating glimpse into the mind of one of the world's intellectual giants. They begin with engaging memories of his childhood and youth and of his burgeoning scientific curiosity and love of the natural world, which led to him joining the expedition on the Beagle. Darwin follows this with survey of his career and ends with a reckoning of his life's work. Interspersed with these recollections are fascinating portraits - from his devoted wife Emma and his talented father, both bullying and kind, to the leading figures of the Victorian scientific world he counted among his friends, including Lyell and Huxley. Honest and illuminating, these memoirs reveal a man who was isolated by his controversial beliefs and whose towering achievements were attained by a life-long passion for the discoveries of science.

Autobiographies

Tony Bleetman

Note to customers: This book is also available under the title "You Can't Park There!: The Highs and Lows of an Air Ambulance Doctor". 
 
 'People get into this work for "the juice", meaning the adrenaline rush, but they don't tell you about the other juices - the mud, blood, snot and grot.' 
 
 Confessions of an Air Ambulance Doctor is the first ever behind-the-scenes account of life onboard an air ambulance. The first of its kind to carry doctors and surgeons who can take the hospital to the patient. Drug addicts, lorry crashes, open-heart surgery, stab wounds, headless chickens, mating llamas, and strip routines – it’s all in a day’s work for emergency doctor Tony Bleetman and his team. 
 
 Whether they are landing in the middle of the M1 or at a maximum security jail, Tony and his crew Helimed 999 are the first on the scene in the most critical of emergencies. 
 
 This gripping read will make you laugh, cry and marvel at the wonders of life (and death) in equal measure.

Confessions of an Air Ambulance Doctor

Stephen Witt

**SHORTLISTED FOR THE FT SCHRODERS BUSINESS BOOK OF THE YEAR 2025 ** 
 
The riveting account of Nvidia, the tech company that has exploded in value for its artificial intelligence computing hardware, and Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s charismatic, uncompromising CEO. 
 
In June of 2024, spurred by the frenzy of investment following the launch of ChatGPT, and thirty-one years after its founding in a Denny’s restaurant, Nvidia became the most-valuable corporation on Earth. In The Thinking Machine, acclaimed journalist Stephen Witt recounts the unlikely story of how a manufacturer of video game components shocked Silicon Valley by conquering the market for AI hardware, and in the process re-invented the computer. 
 
Essential to Nvidia’s meteoric success is its visionary CEO Jensen Huang, who more than a decade ago, on the basis of a few promising scientific results, bet his entire company on AI. Through unprecedented access to Huang, his friends, his investors, and his employees, Witt documents for the first time the company’s epic rise and its iconoclastic CEO, who emerges as a compelling, single-minded, and ferocious leader, and now one of Silicon Valley’s most influential figures. 
 
The Thinking Machine is the story of how Nvidia evolved from providing components for circuit boards to supplying hundred-million dollar supercomputers. It is the story of a determined entrepreneur who defied Wall Street to push his radical vision for computing, in the process becoming one of the wealthiest men alive. It is the story of a revolution in computer architecture, and the small group of renegade engineers who made it happen. And it’s the story of our awesome and terrifying AI future, which Huang has billed as the 'next industrial revolution', as a new kind of microchip unlocks hyper-realistic avatars, autonomous robots, self-driving cars, and new movies, art, and books, generated on command.

The Thinking Machine

Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World’s Most Coveted Microchip

George Dyson

A FINANCIAL TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR 2020 
 
How did we end up in a world where humans coexist with technologies we can no longer fully control or understand? 
 
George Dyson plots an unexpected course through the past 300 years to reveal the hidden connections that underpin our digital age, ending with a premonition of what lies ahead. 
 
From an eighteenth-century Russian voyage across the North Pacific, to the mirror signals that heralded the age of digital telecommunications and the invention of the vacuum tube, Analogia interweaves historical adventure with scientific insight in a deeply personal story that frames the pursuit - and cost - of the digital revolution in a captivating new light.

Analogia

The Entangled Destinies of Nature, Human Beings and Machines

Rahul Jandial

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER 
 
'You're amazing I could talk to you (Rahul) all day' Chris Evans 
 
'This is a gripping new book' The Times 
 
World-leading neuroscientist and neurosurgeon Dr Rahul Jandial draws on his years of work with patients suffering from the most extreme cases of brain damage, disorders and illnesses to reveal what they can tell us about the science of the mind. 
 
From a languages teacher who has to choose whether to lose her ability to speak Spanish or English after brain surgery, to a former TV exec, now homeless, who discovers that his life-altering despondency is the result of a tumour, to a fainting teen who learns that deep breathing can mean the difference between life or death, these stories uncover the secret workings of the brain. 
 
Blending cutting-edge research and beautiful storytelling, Life Lessons from a Brain Surgeon is a vital resource on the best ways to boost your memory, control stress and emotions, minimize pain, unleash your creativity, raise smart kids and reduce the risk of Alzheimer's. This is a deeply practical and readable book, which will take you on an expedition through the anatomy of the most fascinating - and mysterious - of organs. 
 
Rahul's new book Life on a Knife's Edge is out now.

Life Lessons from a Brain Surgeon

The New Science and Stories of the Brain

Ronald L Mallett

Bruce Henderson

Ron Mallett was just 10 when his father died suddenly. Devastated, he found solace in the science fiction of H.G. Wells, believing that if he could build a time machine, he could go back into the past, warn his father and perhaps save his life. 
Ronald Mallett is now a professor of theoretical physics. Remarkably, this working-class African American boy from the Bronx stuck with his vision, overcoming poverty and prejudice in the pursuit of his obsession. This is the story of his extraordinary journey of self- and scientific discovery. With simple language and elegant metaphor he lays out his theories and presents the reader with what is an actual blue print for a time machine.A dramatic and compelling memoir, it is also a brilliant introduction to a riveting but generally baffling subject, and a truly inspirational account of astonishing achievement.

The Time Traveller

One Man's Mission To Make Time Travel A Reality

Les Pringle

This is a re-issue of Blue Nights and Long Nights ISBN 9780552158527. 
 
Card-playing corpses, unfaithful husbands and 'flying' ladies - life as an ambulance driver in the 1970s was certainly varied ... 
 
At the age of twenty-three, Les Pringle decided to escape from office life, broaden his horizons and become an ambulance driver. Little did he realize how broad those horizons would turn out to be. 
 
Filled with warmth and humour, Dial 999! takes us back to a time when lonely old ladies could call 999 and have a cup of tea waiting when the drivers turned up for a chat; when learning to drive the ambulance meant going out for one test drive and managing not to hit a pedestrian; and every day brought a glimpse into other people's lives. 
 
Gripping, poignant and darkly funny, Dial 999!is an affectionate, warm-hearted look at a world gone by.

Dial 999!

Quinn Slobodian

Ben Tarnoff

Who on earth is Elon Musk and what is he doing? Is he a hero, a villain, or does he swing constantly between those two poles? According to the constant media gush driven by his every act and pronouncement, Musk is best understood in personal terms. This book argues differently. Rather than seeing Musk as an individual, it sees him as an avatar of something called Muskism: a playbook for our new postliberal age. 
 
It’s not that Musk himself holds a coherent set of beliefs; you could say his life is one long improvisation. And he’s certainly never used the word Muskism – just as, a century ago, Henry Ford never used Fordism to define his own postliberal modernity. In exploring the forces that have shaped Musk, from South Africa to Silicon Valley, Space X to DOGE, Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff outline the motifs and practices that have come to dominate our own crisis-ridden world. 
 
Muskism, they show, speaks the language of crisis and emergency to invoke a less human future: where humans are purged from the productive process and, through social media and video games, merged with the machine. This is a worldview in which the technocrat is king; which piggybacks on the state to achieve supremacy; and in which only a select few deserve salvation. If you enter, this book warns you, you will grind and you will live in the shadow of one man – but the rewards could be priceless and the alternative might be extinction.

Muskism

A Guide for the Perplexed

Cade Metz

'This colourful page-turner puts artificial intelligence into a human perspective . . . Metz explains this transformative technology and makes the quest thrilling.' Walter Isaacson, author of Steve Jobs 
____________________________________________________ 
 
This is the inside story of a small group of mavericks, eccentrics and geniuses who turned Artificial Intelligence from a fringe enthusiasm into a transformative technology. It's the story of how that technology became big business, creating vast fortunes and sparking intense rivalries. And it's the story of breakneck advances that will shape our lives for many decades to come - both for good and for ill. 
________________________________________________ 
 
'One day soon, when computers are safely driving our roads and speaking to us in complete sentences, we'll look back at Cade Metz's elegant, sweeping Genius Makers as their birth story - the Genesis for an age of sentient machines.' Brad Stone, author of The Everything Store and The Upstarts 
 
'A ringside seat at what may turn out to be the pivotal episode in human history . . . easy and fun to read . . . undeniably charming.' Forbes

Genius Makers

The Mavericks Who Brought A.I. to Google, Facebook, and the World

Meredith Wadman

**SHORTLISTED FOR THE WELLCOME BOOK PRIZE** 
**A GUARDIAN SCIENCE BOOK OF THE YEAR** 
 
‘Riveting … invites comparison to Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks’ 
Nature 
 
The epic and controversial story of a major breakthrough in cell biology that led to the conquest of rubella and other devastating diseases. 
 
Until the late 1960s, tens of thousands of children suffered crippling birth defects if their mothers had been exposed to rubella, popularly known as German measles, while pregnant. There was no vaccine and little understanding of how the disease devastated foetuses. In June 1962, a young biologist in Philadelphia produced the first safe, clean cells that made possible the mass-production of vaccines against many common childhood diseases. Two years later, in the midst of a German measles epidemic, his colleague developed the vaccine that would one day effectively wipe out rubella for good. 
 
This vaccine - and others made with those cells - have since protected hundreds of millions of people worldwide, the vast majority of them preschool children. Meredith Wadman’s account of this great leap forward in medicine is a fascinating and revelatory read.

The Vaccine Race

How Scientists Used Human Cells to Combat Killer Viruses

Robert M Sapolsky

Discover this remarkable account of twenty-one years in remote Kenya with a troop of Savannah baboons from the New York Times bestselling author of Behave. 
 
'One of the best scientist-writers of our time' Oliver Sacks 
 
Brooklyn-born Robert Sapolsky grew up wishing he could live in the primate diorama in the Museum of Natural History. At school he wrote fan letters to primatologists and even taught himself Swahili, all with the hope of one day joining his primate brethren in Africa. But when, at the age of twenty-one, Sapolky's dream finally comes true he discovers that the African bush bears little resemblance to the tranquillity of a museum. 
 
This is the story of the next twenty-one years as Sapolsky slowly infiltrates and befriends a troop of Savannah baboons. Alone in the middle of the Serengeti with no electricity, running water or telephone, and surviving countless scams, culinary atrocities and a surreal kidnapping, Sapolsky becomes ever more enamoured with his adopted baboon troop - unique and compelling characters in their own right - and he returns to them summer after summer, until tragedy finally prevails. 
 
 'A Primate's Memoir is the closest the baboon is likely to come - and it's plenty close enough - to having its own Iliad' New York Times Review of Books 
 
Exhilarating, hilarious and poignant, A Primate's Memoir is a uniquely honest window into the coming-of-age of one of our greatest scientific minds.

A Primate's Memoir

Love, Death and Baboons

Marc Goodman

* THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * 
 
* Future-proof yourself and your business by reading this book * 
 
Technological advances have benefited our world in immeasurable ways, but there is an ominous flipside. Criminals are often the earliest, and most innovative, adopters of technology and modern times have led to modern crimes. Today's criminals are stealing identities, draining online bank-accounts and wiping out computer servers. It's disturbingly easy to activate baby cam monitors to spy on families, pacemakers can be hacked to deliver a lethal jolt, and thieves are analyzing your social media in order to determine the best time for a home invasion. 
 
Meanwhile, 3D printers produce AK-47s, terrorists can download the recipe for the Ebola virus, and drug cartels are building drones. This is just the beginning of the tsunami of technological threats coming our way. In Future Crimes, Marc Goodman rips open his database of hundreds of real cases to give us front-row access to these impending perils. Reading like a sci-fi thriller, but based in startling fact, Goodman raises tough questions about the expanding role of technology in our lives. Future Crimes is a call to action for better security measures worldwide, but most importantly, will empower readers to protect themselves against these looming technological threats - before it's too late.

Future Crimes

Inside The Digital Underground and the Battle For Our Connected World

Samantha Cristoforetti

‘I read a lot of writings by astronauts in my research for Orbital, but this was my go-to. It's written with clarity, generosity, humour, humility and heart’ Samantha Harvey 
 
'Today I woke up on Earth. And I will fall asleep in space' 
 
In space the sun rises and sets 16 times a day. You fly over every sea, every mountain and desert, every city and every port. The most ordinary things -- eating, sleeping, brushing your teeth or cutting your hair -- have to be relearned, until they become familiar again. This is the story of Samantha Cristoforetti's incredible journey to becoming an astronaut, and her journey beyond Earth. 
 
Her voyage as an apprentice astronaut began when she was in her early thirties: five years of intense training around the world, from Houston to Japan to the legendary Star City in Russia. Countless hours spent in centrifuges, spaceship simulators and under water for spacewalk practice. Then, one day, a rocket was waiting for her on the launch pad. And after eight minutes of wild ascent, she was on orbit, crunched up with her two crewmates in a tiny spaceship that took them to the International Space Station. 
 
With honesty and warmth, Cristoforetti chronicles the two hundred days she spent on the ISS, the joys and challenges of being in an extraordinary place, from the sublime sight of seeing Earth for the first time to more unusual concerns, such as mastering the art of floating. How do you find your bearings when there is no up and down? What is it like to run in weightlessness? And how do you cook in space? 
 
This is an enthralling, inspiring and surprisingly down-to-earth story about what it really takes to pursue your dreams.

Diary of an Apprentice Astronaut

Henry Marsh

**BBC DOCUMENTARY CONFESSIONS OF A BRAIN SURGEON IS OUT NOW** 
 
From the No.1 bestselling author of Do No Harm, an entrancing and uplifting meditation on the gift of life. 
 
‘A book to treasure and reread’ Gavin Francis, author of Adventures in Human Being 
 
As a retired brain surgeon, Henry Marsh thought he understood illness, but even he was unprepared for the impact of his diagnosis of advanced cancer. 
 
In And Finally, he navigates the bewildering transition from doctor to patient. As the days pass, his mind turns to his career, to the people and places he has known, and to creative projects still to be completed. 
 
Yet he is also more entranced than ever by the mysteries of science and nature, by his love for his family, and – most of all – by what it is to be alive. 
 
* A Daily Telegraph, The Times and Financial Times Book of the Year * 
 
‘Magnificent’ Rachel Clarke 
 
‘Vividly wry and honest’ The Times 
 
‘I admire this book enormously’ Philip Pullman 
 
‘Enthralling’ Guardian

And Finally

A Neurosurgeon’s Reflections on Life

Matters of Life and Death, the Sunday Times bestseller from the author of DO NO HARM

Gary Fildes

A Bricklayer's Guide to the Galaxy . . . 
 
The inspirational memoir of a former brickie who followed his passion for the stars and built his own observatory. 
 
Perfect for readers of Robert Macfarlane, Helen Macdonald and James Rebanks - as well as fans of Brian Cox and the BBC’s Sky at Night 
 
 
Gary Fildes left school at sixteen, got a trade like most of his mates and was soon married with four kids. His life seemed set. But he had a secret. Something he only practised late at night with a few like-minded friends. Then one day, middle age approaching alarmingly, he acted on his lifelong passion. He finally came out. As an astronomer. 
 
Today, Gary is the founder and lead astronomer of Kielder Observatory, one of the top ten stargazing sites in the world, which he also helped to build. Situated in the beautiful forests of Kielder, Northumberland, within Europe’s largest protected dark sky park, it offers some of the UK's most spectacular views of stars, planets and galaxies. 
 
An Astronomer’s Tale is Gary’s inspirational story: part memoir, part nature writing, part seasonal guide to the night sky. It is a book brimming with passion; and at a time when the world is captivated by space, it will leave you ready to get out there and explore the wonders of the skies for yourself.

An Astronomer's Tale

A Bricklayer’s Guide to the Galaxy

Jim Down

As a doctor on the intensive care unit at one of London's top hospitals, Jim Down has spent his life working as healthcare's last resort, where each day reveals a new challenge. But nothing could prepare Jim and his colleagues for the events of spring 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic put them on the frontline of a global health crisis. 
 
In Life Support, Jim tells the extraordinary month-by-month story of how, as the world came to a standstill, he and his co-workers faced down the biggest challenge in the history of the NHS. Full of warmth, honesty and humour, this book is a gripping and moving testament to the everyday heroism of the NHS staff in a global emergency, and an unforgettable insight into what was really happening on the wards as we clapped on our doorsteps.

Life Support

Diary of an ICU Doctor on the Frontline of the Covid Crisis

Maggie Campbell-Culver

Given the extent of his influence on 17th-century life, and his lasting impact on the British landscape it is remarkable that no book has been written before about John Evelyn. He was a longstanding friend of Samuel Pepys (who wrote of him, ' A most excellent person he is, and must be allowed a little for conceitedness; but he may well be so, being a man so much above others.'), a founder-member of the Royal Society and a prolific writer and diarist. He was an early advocate of the garden city but his most important work was Sylva: a Discourse of Forest Trees. Sylva was presented to the Royal Society to promote the planting of timber trees 'for the supply of the Navy, the employment and advantage of the poor as well as the ornamenting of the nation.' He was responsible for the first great raft of tree-planting and for a great influx of tree introductions to Britain. 
 
Maggie Campbell-Culver's book, like Sylva, has at its core a section detailing the characteristics, history and uses of 33 trees incorporating the advice Evelyn gave and demonstrating its relevance still in the 20th-century. Not only was Evelyn probably the first horticultural writer to show an appreciation of the aesthetic benefits of trees in our landscape, he is shown to be a founder-father of the modern conservation movement.

A Passion For Trees

The Legacy Of John Evelyn

Charlotte Raven

Edward Wild

'Searingly honest and important' RACHEL CLARKE 
 
Honest, intelligent and unsentimental, Patient 1 is a startling self-portrait written with wit and vulnerability, and a unique testament to the power of hope in the face of illness. 
 
Charlotte Raven had never heard of Huntington's Disease when, in her mid-thirties, she discovered that her father was suffering from the illness. Life for her and her young family would never be the same again. 
 
Frank and fearless, this is her memoir of coming to terms with this inherited neurodegenerative disease and its impact on her body, mind and memory. It is at once an act of self-preservation and a kind of reckoning: with the illness, with the person she once was and with the person she is now. 
 
 In an afterword, Raven's doctor Ed Wild - one of the country's leading experts in Huntington's - explains how doctors and patients like Charlotte are working together in the hope of one day eliminating this disease altogether. 
 
'Insightful, frank and often moving...Raven writes with humour...and no small amount of courage' Guardian 
 
Shortlisted for the RSL Christopher Bland Prize 2022

Patient 1

Forgetting and Finding Myself

Jim McCaul

'Face to Face is not just a brilliant introduction to one of the most exacting areas of modern medicine, it's a humbling glimpse of humans at their best.' Sunday Times 
 
So much of our identity and sense of self is vested in the face we see in the bathroom mirror every morning. Now imagine that face so ravaged by cancer, an accident, a gun shot wound or a car crash that it is barely recognizable. Think how it might feel if, after surgery, the person you remember, but had given up all hope of seeing again, is looking back at you from the mirror once more. 
 
Over the years, maxillofacial surgeon Jim McCaul has helped countless people make this journey. His extraordinary book follows the stories of some of the patients he has saved from terrible illness and life-changing injuries – and some he wasn’t able to help. We follow the epic and complex surgical procedures his job requires him to perform daily, where the margin for error is to all intents and purposes zero. 
 
Face to Face is a journey through the most high-tech and complex of microsurgical procedures as well as the facial reconstruction techniques pioneered during the First World War. But at its heart are the human stories of the patients for whom treatment is often quite literally a matter of life and death. 
 
'Fascinating and life-affirming ... Jim McCaul confides in us the joys and the agony of facial surgery.' Dr Richard Shepherd, bestselling author of Unnatural Causes

Face to Face

True stories of life, death and transformation from my career as a facial surgeon

Pope Lonergan

Nominated for the Chortle Comedy Book Award 2023 
 
'Blisteringly well written, deeply humane and very funny' Daily Telegraph 
'Enough to make you die laughing' Daily Mail 
'Funny and moving' Daily Express 
 
Whether he's initiating a coup d'état against new regulations with the residents, or forging a bond with the 98-year old who once called him a fat slut, Pope Lonergan's work is infinitely varied. This no-holds-barred account shows what life inside a care home is really like, for both residents and carers. Featuring night-time drama, incontinence pads and the uniquely dark humour of one double-amputee Alzheimer's patient, here you can learn everything you ever wanted to know (and a few things you probably really didn't) about Britain's care system. 
 
This important memoir challenges us all to think differently about the value of our elderly, and also the carers who look after them.

I'll Die After Bingo

My unlikely life as a care home assistant

Daisy Picture Books

The Christmasaurus Picture Book

Mrs Pepperpot Picture Books

Princess Poppy Picture Books

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