Virginia Woolf, born in 1882, was the major novelist at the heart of the inter-war Bloomsbury Group. Her early novels include The Voyage Out, Night and Day and Jacob's Room. Between 1925 and 1931 she produced her finest masterpieces, including Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando and the experimental The Waves. Her later novels include The Years and Between the Acts, and she also maintained an astonishing output of literary criticism, journalism and biography, including the passionate feminist essay A Room of One's Own. Suffering from depression, she drowned herself in the River Ouse in 1941.

Virginia Woolf

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Gabriel Weston

How does it feel to hold someone's life in your hands? What is it like to cut into someone else's body? What is it like to stand by, powerless, while someone dies because of the incompetence of your seniors? How do you tell a beautiful young man who seems perfectly fit that he has only a few days left to live? 
 
Gabriel Weston worked as a surgeon in the big-city hospitals of the twenty-first century; a woman in a world dominated by Alpha males. Her world was one of disease, suffering and extraordinary pressure where a certain moral ambiguity and clinical detachment were necessary tools for survival. Startling and honest, her account combines a fierce sense of human dignity with compassion and insight, illuminating scenes of life and death the rest of us rarely glimpse. 
 
Direct Red won the 2010 PEN/ Ackerley Prize and was longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award 2009.

Direct Red

A Surgeon's Story

Georgie Edwards

‘I am one of the old school and believe that a woman’s place is within the home … However, I cannot, I will not, condone unfairness amongst females. I suggest that in due course you send your Matron a letter of thanks. You had after all a most unusual reference.’ 
 
In 1949, Staff Nurse Georgie Edwards is asked to chaperone medical students undertaking their practical exams when suddenly the penny drops. Georgie wants to learn to diagnose and treat too. 
 
Against the odds, she wins herself a place to study medicine at London’s St Bartholomew’s Hospital and she sets about becoming not a consultant ‘who sweeps by’ but a doctor who listens and cares. Yet Georgie wants to fall in love and start a family as well as have a career – is this one dream too many for a woman in the 1950s? 
 
Warm and full of humour, The Best Medicine is Georgie’s fascinating memoir of her early years as a nurse and doctor.

The Best Medicine

The True Story of a Nurse who became a Doctor in the 1950s

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

Averil Mansfield

'A great read. I am honoured to have worked with such a legend' David Nott 
'A role model for women' Independent 
'A wonderful read' Julian Fellowes 
'Remarkable' Lauren Laverne 
'Charming' Guardian 
 
We were occasionally expected to travel by ambulance to a serious case and would always have a kit of tools and drugs ready for emergency calls. On one occasion, we were responding to a man who had fallen into the hold of a grain ship and broken his leg. I was expected to go down a pole into the ship to administer analgaesia before he could be rescued. The 'audience' of shipworkers delighted in telling me that there were rats the size of dogs down in the grain. The other problem was that this was the era of the mini skirt, and you can imagine what that meant. Following the incident, I instituted the purchase of some 'Casualty Officers Emergency Dungarees' as an addition to the kit. 
 
Averil Mansfield established herself as a pioneer in every sense of the word when she qualified as a surgeon in the early 1970s. At the time just two per cent of her colleagues were female, and she was often met with surprise, bordering on disbelief and amusement, when telling people what she did. But time and again, Averil proved herself more than capable of the role which had been her greatest dream since the age of eight. After a formidable operating career in Liverpool and London, during which she made many enduring friendships, she went on to became the UK's first ever female professor of surgery. 
 
Life in Her Hands is the remarkable story of a truly trailblazing woman. Averil's account shines light on a medical and societal world that has changed beyond measure, but which - as she shows through her experiences - still has a long way to go for the women finding their place within it.

Life in Her Hands

The Inspiring Story of a Pioneering Female Surgeon

Molly Case

The hand of a stranger offered in solace. A flower placed on a dead body as a mark of respect. It is these moments of empathy that define us as people. 
 
Nobody knows this better than a nurse. In How to Treat People, Molly Case documents these extraordinary moments of human connection and compassion. In rich, lyrical prose, she introduces us to patients going through the most extreme experiences. And when her father is admitted to the high dependency unit on which she works, Molly confronts care in a whole new way, when two worlds - the professional and the personal - suddenly collide.

How to Treat People

A Nurse at Work

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

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

Arnold Thomas Fanning

Arnold Thomas Fanning had his first experience of depression during adolescence, following the death of his mother. Some ten years later, an up-and-coming playwright, he was overcome by mania and delusions. Thus began a terrible period in which he was often suicidal, increasingly disconnected from family and friends, sometimes in trouble with the law, and homeless in London. 
 
Drawing on his own memories, the recollections of people who knew him when he was at his worst, and medical and police records, Arnold Thomas Fanning has produced a beautifully written, devastatingly intense account of madness - and recovery, to the point where he has not had any serious illness for over a decade and has become an acclaimed playwright. In a remarkably vivid present-tense narrative, Fanning manages to convey the consciousness of a person living with mania, psychosis and severe depression. 
 
Very few people have gone through what Arnold Thomas Fanning went through and emerged alive, well, and capable of telling the tale with such skill and insight. Mind on Fire is a book anyone who has experienced mental illness, or is close to someone who is mentally ill, or who wishes to understand the workings of the disordered mind.

Mind on Fire

Shortlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize 2019

Duncan Harding

A likeable young girl burns her family home to the ground 
 
A man has no memory of the night he killed his wife 
 
A teenager’s visions have murderous effect 
 
One question binds the cases of Dr Duncan Harding, Britain’s top forensic psychiatrist: Why? 
 
Growing up in a violent home, Harding became a doctor to be good and kind. His journey brought him to psychopaths, to the limits of his compassion and to the darkest corners of his own troubled past. 
 
But he’s never turned away nor given up hope. Mesmerising, insightful and redemptive, The Criminal Mind is his unforgettable story.

The Criminal Mind

Ping Fu

Ping Fu was born on the eve of China's Cultural Revolution; aged just eight she was taken from the arms of her loving family. She suffered appalling treatment and was denied an education. For ten years she lived in bleak dormitories, while protecting her younger sister from Mao's Red Guards. 
 
She survived, even succeeding in gaining admission to university. Yet, her education brought unwanted political attention and she was forced into exile. Arriving in the United States, speaking just three words in English, she set about making her fortune ... 
 
Bend, Not Break tells the incredible personal story of a journey from imprisonment to freedom, from the dogmatic anticapitalism of Mao's China to the high-stakes world of technology start-ups in the US. It is a tribute to one woman's courage in the face of cruelty, and a valuable lesson on the enduring power of resilience.

Bend, Not Break

From Mao's China to the White House

Neil Roberts

Peter Redgrove

The work of the poet Peter Redgrove is one of the great unexplored treasures of late twentieth century literature. His prolific output presents an intriguing variety of personae: magician, scientist, lover, psychologist, joker, madman. It is only now, with the publication of his Collected Poems and this biography, that we can see how and why these personae developed - and discover the full depth and range of this visionary writer. 
 
Born into an apparently conventional middle-class family that was in reality deeply disturbed, the poet finally emerged: transforming himself from the neurotic, Oedipal young scientist, through a process of mental breakdown, insulin coma therapy, erotic revelation and the discovery of poetic companionship at Cambridge - and particularly his friendship and rivalry with Ted Hughes. 
 
Neil Roberts explores the inner story of this emergence, and Redgrove's later development through marriage, family life, the fellowship of the 'Group', alcoholic excess, infidelity and marital breakdown to his triumphant later partnership with Penelope Shuttle. We also discover, for the first time, some darker secrets: his fascination with Aleister Crowley, his damaged and damaging relationship with his father, and the lifelong sexual fetish which he called the 'Game'. Drawing on the poet's intimate journals and correspondence, and interviews with family, friends and colleagues, A Lucid Dreamer tells the exceptionally inward and revealing story of an astonishing creative life.

A Lucid Dreamer

The Life of Peter Redgrove

David Bellamy

David Bellamy is a natural story teller whose memoir is packed full of funny anecdotes and observations. He depicts wonderfully a childhood of discovery and adventure growing up in Carshalton during the second world war.  Despite rationing and evacuation, these were happy days of tremendous freedom spent roaming the wonderland of the surrounding countryside searching for bugs, beetles and bits of old shrapnel which young Bellamy and his brother would smuggle home to  their father's shed for their firework-making sessions. His growing love of nature is interwoven with loving, often hilarious, portraits of the various characters he meets along the way.   From his days as a student in fifties London to his trial by fire lectureship at Durham University with a young wife and ever-growing family to support, Bellamy reveals his many great loves from sports cars to ballet.  He also writes of his more serious concerns, with his reputation for being outspoken and undeterred in the face of big enterprises and corporations revealed in his battles and campaigns.

A Natural Life

Alison Bashford

In his early twenties, poor, depressed, stranded in the Coral Sea on the HMS Rattlesnake, hopelessly in love with the young Englishwoman Henrietta Heathorn, Thomas Henry Huxley was a nobody. And yet together he and Henrietta would return to London and go on to found one of the great intellectual and scientific dynasties of their age. 
 
The Huxley family through four generations profoundly shaped how we all see ourselves, as individuals and as a species. They worked as scientists, novelists, mystics, film-makers, poets and above all, as public lecturers, educators and explainers. 
 
Their speciality was evolution in all its forms. But perhaps their greatest subject was themselves. Alison Bashford's engaging and original book interweaves the Huxleys' momentous public achievements with their private triumphs and tragedies. The result is the history of a family, but also a history of humanity grappling with its place in nature. This book shows how much we owe - for better or worse - to the unceasing curiosity, self-absorption and enthusiasms of a small, strange group of men and women.

An Intimate History of Evolution

The Story of the Huxley Family

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

Sophie Martin

&lsquo;A vital, heartfelt read for anyone navigating the rough seas of infertility and pregnancy loss&rsquo; &ndash; Leah Hazard, author of Hard PushedAn insightful, moving memoir, capturing life working as a midwife in a busy NHS hospital at the same time as dealing with experiences of infertility, IVF and loss. As a young married couple, Sophie Martin and her husband spent years trying to conceive. They went through several rounds of IVF, at great expense, and even travelled overseas for treatment, never quite knowing whether they would one day have a family. Alongside this, Sophie was working hard at a job she loved: looking after expectant mothers and newborn babies as a midwife in a busy hospital, where the patients&rsquo; daily new additions were a constant reminder of Sophie&rsquo;s own setbacks in pursuit of motherhood. The Infertile Midwife is a deeply personal, moving account of chasing something that you want so desperately. It also offers a much-needed look at how society treats infertility &ndash; from the language we use to the small talk we make &ndash; and the ways in which we can all do more to make things better for hopeful parents. With great warmth and honesty, Sophie shares her experiences of the bursts of hope and moments of great loss, but also the humour, love and joy that can be found in even the darkest places.

The Infertile Midwife

In Search of Motherhood - A Memoir

Maggie Aderin

From a childhood in Camden to the frontiers of space, an inspirational memoir from space scientist, presenter of The Sky at Night, and bestselling author Maggie Aderin. 
 
'I'd toast the moon and look at the sky... I think it draws us to it; we wonder what lies beyond.' 
 
Maggie Aderin's destiny was always written in the stars. From the age of three, inspired by The Clangers, her dream was to go into space. Throughout a chaotic childhood, ricocheting between divorced parents and acrimonious custody battles, she attended thirteen schools in fourteen years – but while her environment regularly changed, her fascination with the Universe did not. It became enmeshed in her desire to succeed as a scientist even when her school careers advice was to become a nurse. 
 
Starchild is Maggie’s emotionally honest and revealing memoir, telling a story of education and prejudice, adversity and ambition, motherhood and the moon – all recounted in her characteristically warm and relatable style. From being the only Black woman on her physics course at Imperial College London, to her groundbreaking work on the James Webb and Gemini telescopes, to starting her own public speaking company and sharing the wonders of science with thousands of children every year, Maggie’s story will inspire you to never give up on your dreams.

Starchild

My Life Under the Night Sky

Hadley Vlahos

‘Refreshingly forthright’ New York Times | ‘Extraordinary’ Laura Lynne Jackson | ‘Beautifully written’ Katy Butler | ‘Tender and transformative’ Christie Tate | ‘Meaningful and sublime’ Theresa Brown 
 
What can life’s final moments teach us about living well today? 
 
In this bestselling memoir, palliative care nurse Hadley Vlahos recounts the unforgettable tales of the hospice patients whose journeys of self-discovery inspired her sense of purpose and hope. From the elderly man seeing visions of his late daughter, to the young patient lamenting the time wasted fearing judgment, to the woman whose unwavering belief in her faith was shaken up by the prospect of dying. 
 
Each story teaches us to embrace life’s fleeting nature, and raises vital questions: How do we make peace with the end? How can we honour our late loved ones? And, above all, how can we make each day count? 
 
Compassionate and thought-provoking, The In-Between is a celebration of life’s great unknowns, and a comfort as we navigate what comes next. 
 
‘Heartfelt, gentle … refreshingly forthright’ New York Times 
 
‘Beautifully written … contains profound wisdom.’ Katy Butler, author of The Art of Dying Well 
 
‘Transformative … makes dying feel like a peaceful, dynamic, and nourishing event.’ Christie Tate, author of Group 
 
‘Offers gentle encouragement for all those who live under life’s running clock and for those who love them.’ Kirkus Reviews

The In-Between

Stories of Care and Connection in Life’s Final Moments

Unforgettable Encounters During Life's Final Moments

Chandler Burr

In the tradition of Susan Orlean's The Orchid Thief and James Gleick's Genius, The Emperor of Scent tells the story of Luca Turin, an utterly unusual, stubborn scientist, his otherworldly gift for perfume, his brilliant, quixotic theory of how we smell, and his struggle to set before the world the secret of the most enigmatic of our senses.

The Emperor Of Scent

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

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

Evelyn Prentis

'It must be stressed from the start that I was not a born nurse. Not every girl is. Not every nurse is either, however wholeheartedly she may throw herself into the project once she gets going. Born nurses can be easily recognised. They have a little something the others haven't got which never seems to desert them however desperate the circumstances may become' 
 
Desperate circumstances were something Evelyn Prentis had to get very used to when she began her life as a nurse. It was in 1934 that Evelyn left home for the first time to enrol as a trainee at a busy Nottingham hospital in the hope of £25 a year. 
 
A Nurse in Time is her affectionate and funny account of those days of dedication and hardship, when never-ending nightshifts, strict Sisters and permanent hunger ruled life, and joy was to be found in a late-night pass and a packet of Woodbines.

A Nurse in Time

Sue Black

WINNER OF THE CWA GOLD DAGGER FOR NON-FICTION 
'Gripping from the start, Written in Bone is superb' - Dr Richard Shepherd, author of Unnatural Causes 
'No Scientist communicates better than Sue Black' - Val McDermid, author of Still Life 
'Macabre, authoritative and fascinating.' - The Sunday Times 
 
Our bones are the silent witnesses to the lives we lead. Our stories are marbled into their marrow. 
 
Drawing upon her years of research and a wealth of remarkable experience, the world-renowned forensic anthropologist Professor Dame Sue Black takes us on a journey of revelation. From skull to feet, via the face, spine, chest, arms, hands, pelvis and legs, she shows that each part of us has a tale to tell. What we eat, where we go, everything we do leaves a trace, a message that waits patiently for months, years, sometimes centuries, until a forensic anthropologist is called upon to decipher it. 
 
Some of this information is easily understood, some holds its secrets tight and needs scientific cajoling to be released. But by carefully piecing together the evidence, the facts of a life can be rebuilt. 
 
Limb by limb, case by case - some criminal, some historical, some unaccountably bizarre - Sue Black reconstructs with intimate sensitivity and compassion the hidden stories in what we leave behind. 
 
Praise for Sue Black: 
 
'Sue Black has a rare ability to make blood and bones come alive. A marvellous writer. Ruth Davidson, SMP 
'The corpse whisperer ... Is it okay for Black, or us, to enjoy this quite so much?' 
'Fascinating' - Spectator 
'Gripping' - Guardian 
'Moving' - Scotsman 
'Engrossing' - Financial Times

Written In Bone

hidden stories in what we leave behind

Rana el Kaliouby

A captivating memoir that chronicles one woman's mission to humanise technology and what she learns about humanity along the way. 
 
Now more than ever, we find ourselves unable to express our true feelings through technology. Rana el Kaliouby discovered this when she left Cairo, a newly-married, Muslim woman, to take up her place at Cambridge University to study computer science. Many thousands of miles from home, she began to develop systems to help her better connect with her family. She started to pioneer the new field of Emotional Intelligence (EI). She now runs her company, Affectiva (the industry-leader in this emerging field) that builds EI into our technology and develops systems that understand humans the way we understand one another. This is the fascinating story of her mission to humanise technology and what she learns about humanity along the way.

Girl Decoded

My Quest to Make Technology Emotionally Intelligent – and Change the Way We Interact Forever

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

David Bellamy is a natural story teller whose memoir will be packed full of funny anecdotes and observations. It is the story of how a city boy, brought up in the middle of London, went for a trip into the countryside one day, an event which was to transform his life by setting in motion the amazing love of nature which would make famous this larger-than-life character. In his infectious style he illumines on, amongst other things, the fact that his father, the manager of a branch of Boots, had to grease his hair straight - because in those days managers of Boots weren't allowed to have curly hair! Then there was the time he and his brother discovered an exploded bomb, kept in the garden shed - and then accidentally blew off the front of the house with it. He reveals his secret passion is  ballet dancing - and how his mother only found out about it when she saw him on stage at the Fairfield Hall in Croydon.  His career as an academic, then author, broadcaster, consultant and television personality, spans 35 years and his main passion - campaigning for the environment - have led to many adventures including his being twice imprisoned in the Third World.

Jolly Green Giant

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

Christian Donlan

'My daughter took her first steps on the day I was diagnosed - a juxtaposition so perfect, so trite, so filled with the tacky artifice of real life that I am generally too embarrassed to tell anybody about it.' 
 
Shortly after his daughter Leontine was born, Christian Donlan's world shifted an inch to the left. He started to miss light switches and door handles when reaching for them. He would injure himself in a hundred stupid ways every day. First playful and then maddening, these strange experiences were the early symptoms of multiple sclerosis, an incurable and degenerative neurological illness. 
 
Multiple sclerosis is a fiercely destructive disease, yet it is also, as Donlan starts to discover, a perversely creative force. As his young daughter starts to investigate her environment, he too finds himself exploring a strange new landscape - the shifting and bewildering territory of the brain.

The Unmapped Mind

A Memoir of Neurology, Multiple Sclerosis and Learning How to Live

Ruth McKernan

Science is just one way of looking at life. As a neuroscientist working at the forefront of medical research it is Ruth McKernan's way. When her father, Billy, succumbed to a mystery illness and slipped from consciousness into coma, Ruth watched his life ebb away with a mixture of love and terror. She struggled for control by using her scientific knowledge to analyse his medical condition. 
 
In this moving account of her father's last year, love, grief and hope are intertwined with a crystal-clear scientific explanation of the way our brains and bodies work. The result is an inspired blend where the contrasting view of scientist and daughter ultimately unite.

Billy's Halo

Roger Osborne

Detective story, social history, human drama, The Deprat Affair recreates the hothouse atmosphere of colonial Indochina in the early twentieth century. Among its cliques, its bitter rivalries, its nepotism and favours, how are we to disentangle the scientific, the moral and the legal 'truths' of the affair?   Most of all, the story centres on one compelling individual - Jacques Deprat. En route to a golden future as one of France's greatest geologists, he is suddenly accused of fraud and plunged into a desperate fight to save his reputation. Convicted of placing European fossils among samples collected in Indochina, he is dismissed from his job, and expelled from the Société Géologique de France. Thrown out of the science to which he has given everything, he re-invents himself, changes his name, and begins not one, but two fascinating new lives - each as extraordinary and colourful as the one he left behind. And even in the manner of his premature death, Deprat proved his ability to shake the world.   Eighty years on from his conviction, the truth of the Deprat affair is still in doubt - and is still passionately debated among French scientists. But innocent or guilty, Jacques Deprat is an astonishing figure, whose capacity to overcome the world's disgrace and the dissolution of his dreams makes an amazing and captivating story.

The Deprat Affair

Mark Bostridge

Whether honoured and admired or criticized and ridiculed, Florence Nightingale has invariably been misrepresented and misunderstood. As the Lady with the Lamp, ministering to the wounded and dying of the Crimean War, she offers an enduring image of sentimental appeal and one that is permanently lodged in our national consciousness. But the awesome scale of her achievements over the course of her 90 years is infinitely more troubling - and inspiring - than this mythical simplification. 
 
 From her tireless campaigning and staggering intellectual abilities to her tortured relationship with her sister and her distressing medical condition, this vivid and immensely readable biography draws on a wealth of unpublished material and previously unseen family papers, disentangling the myth from the reality and reinvigorating with new life one of the most iconic figures in modern British history.

Florence Nightingale

The Woman and Her Legend: 200th Anniversary Edition

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