Alice Snape is founder and editor of Things &amp; Ink magazine, now online at th-ink.co.uk. An expert and authority on tattoos from within the global tattoo community, she is the go-to commentator in the media. She has appeared on Newsnight, ITV news, BBC Radio and more. She has also written on tattoos for the Guardian, Inked, Marie Claire, Stylist, Bust, Total Tattoo and other prominent tattoo press and blogs.

Alice Snape

Alice Steinbach

Alice Tait is a well-known British illustrator who loves to draw. Alice’s favourite commissions are for children’s books, and her favourite thing to draw is dogs, so working on The Ultimate Kids' Guide to Dogs has been a real career high! As well as her work in children’s publishing as an author-illustrator, Alice’s artwork can be seen across adult publishing, fashion, posh food and even her own brand of gifts, which is the best-selling London gift range in the UK. In between high-profile commissions, and being mother to two very active young children, Alice loves nothing better than to nip out with her sketchbook to take inspiration from the streets around her, and the people (and dogs!) she sees.

Alice Tait

Alice Tate is a freelancer writer and blogger living in London. She studied Fashion Design at the University of Leeds before moving to New York and then Sydney to work for Refinery 29, W Magazine, NYLON and RUSSH. Alice moved back to UK to help launch Refinery 29 in London. She also writes for Metro International, Grazia, Evening Standard, The Pool, Conde Nast Traveller, Travel + Leisure and British Airways Highlife. You can also find Alice at her blog FlashAnthology.com.

Alice Tate

Alice Thomson

Alice is an arts journalist who has been growing things in London for a while now, but she really became fascinated with plants after taking over a wind-blown balcony nearly three years ago. A self-taught gardener, she has learned how to grow plants to eat, admire and enjoy both inside and out, and maintains that limited experience and space shouldn't stop anyone from growing things. For the past year Alice has been documenting her plant adventures on Instagram as @noughticulture and keeping a column on urban and rookie gardening for The Telegraph.

Alice Vincent

Alice spent over eleven years in the Metropolitan Police Service as a constable. Her memoir about life on the beat, On The Line: Life - and Death - In the Metropolitan Police (Two Roads), received excellent reviews and led her to becoming a crime and police commentator for national media, as well as working with the BBC and other television production companies on various police dramas and documentaries. She lives with her children near the sea in Essex.

Alice Vinten

Alice Walker

Alice Waters

Alice Williams is an illustrator from London who captures cosy scenes depicting cats at play. Her world is warm and bright, wanting to fill her audience with comfort and hope. Aside from drawing, Alice enjoys journaling, crocheting and crafting. She often shares videos of herself online, documenting her artistic adventures.

Alice Williams

Alice Winn lives in Brooklyn, where she writes screenplays. She grew up in Paris and was educated in British boarding schools. She has a degree in English Literature from Oxford University. IN MEMORIAM is her debut novel.

Alice Winn

Alicia Appleman-Jurman (1930-2017) was a writer and lecturer. A Polish Jew, as a child she escaped the Nazis by being thrown through the window of a train taking her family to an extermination camp. Her parents and four brothers were all murdered. As a member of a resistance group, she helped to smuggle Jews out of Poland to Austria, and then on to what would become Israel. Her memoir, Alicia: Memoirs of a Survivor, is an account of her experiences of the Holocaust.

Alicia Appleman-Jurman

Alicia Brodersen

Alicia Foster

Alicia Garza is an innovator, strategist and organizer. She is the Principal at the Black Futures Lab, co-creator of #BlackLivesMatter and the Black Lives Matter Global Network, the Director of Strategy and Partnerships at the US National Domestic Workers Association, co-founder of Supermajority and host of the podcast Lady Don't Take No.

Alicia Garza

Alicia Thompson is a writer, reader, and Paramore superfan. As a teen, she appeared in an episode of 48 hours in the audience of a local murder trial, where she broke the fourth wall by looking directly into the camera. She currently lives in Florida with her husband and two children.

Alicia Thompson

Alina Reyes

Alina Tierney is a nutritionist and food consultant who holds an MSc in Nutrition and Food Sciences from the University of Reading.

Alina Tierney

Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez

Alisdair Aird

Alison

Alison Bashford is Laureate Professor of History at the University of New South Wales. Bashford was previously Vere Harmsworth Professor of Imperial and Naval History at the University of Cambridge. She is Fellow of the British Academy, the Australian Academy of Humanities and Honorary Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge. In 2020 she was awarded the Royal Society (NSW) History and Philosophy of Science Medal for transformative historical studies of the biomedical and environmental sciences. In 2021 she was awarded the Dan David Prize for scholarship in the history of medicine.

Alison Bashford

Alison Bechdel is the author of three internationally acclaimed graphic memoirs, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama and The Secret to Superhuman Strength. Fun Home was a New York Times bestseller, won an Eisner Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. It was named a Best Book of the 21st Century by the Guardian, was adapted to a broadway musical which won five Tony Awards and is currently being adapted for cinema. For twenty-five years, she wrote and drew the comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, a visual chronicle of modern life - queer and otherwise - considered 'one of the preeminent oeuvres in the comics genre'. Alison Bechdel is guest editor of Best American Comics, 2011, and has drawn comics for Slate, McSweeney's, Entertainment Weekly, Granta, and The New York Times Book Review. In 2014 she was named as one of the recipients of the MacArthur 'Genius' Award. 
 
http://dykestowatchoutfor.com/

Alison Bechdel

Alison Bingeman

Alison Bond worked in the film industry for seven years before writing her debut novel How to Be Famous, published in 2005. A graduate of Bournemouth Media School, Alison currently lectures on the harsh realities of the film business as part of their MA screenwriting programme.

Alison Bond

Alison Bowser

Alison Davies is the author of over 30 books. She runs workshops at universities throughout the UK, showing academics, students and early years practitioners how stories can be used as tools for teaching and learning. Alison writes for a wide selection of magazines and her features have also appeared in the Times Education Supplement, Daily Mail and Sunday Express parenting section, and various commercial magazines.

Alison Davies

Alison Entrekin

Alison Goldsworthy has been a political adviser and campaigner for more than twenty years. A former Deputy Chair of the Liberal Democrats, she led the team that built the fastest-growing campaigning organisation in the UK. In 2017 she was a Sloan Fellow at Stanford, co-creating its first depolarisation course. A board member of the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust, Alison has won numerous awards for her work. She has written for the Telegraph, Independent, New Statesman, The Times and Financial Times.

Alison Goldsworthy

Alison Goodman lives in bayside Melbourne, Australia with her husband and their indomitable Jack Russell Terrier. Alison was a D.J. O'Hearn Memorial Fellow at Melbourne University, holds a Masters degree, and has taught creative writing at postgraduate level. Her debut novel was the award-winning futuristic thriller, Singing the Dogstar Blues, and her second, the acclaimed adult crime thriller, Killing the Rabbit. She is currently writing full-time and mentoring others through the wild and wonderful process of writing a novel.

Alison Goodman

PublicationStatus

Brand

Format

AgeRange

Series

Imprint

CategoryLabel

Battersea Dogs & Cats Home

Discover these heart-warming tales from Battersea Dogs and Cats Home, celebrating the power of animals to transform people's lives. 
 
We hear from the young boy whose Battersea dog helped him to deal with a serious autoimmune disease, and from a woman whose Staffie was the friend who got her through cancer. 
 
We meet the couple who were brought together by a Battersea dog; the man who took on a three-legged kitten which changed his life; and the former Battersea hound which became a search and rescue dog. 
 
Read these and many other powerful stories in Lost and Found.

Lost and Found

True tales of love and rescue from Battersea Dogs & Cats Home

Nick Hornby

'I decided that I wanted to write a little book of essays about songs I loved ... Songs are what I listen to, almost to the exclusion of everything else.' 
 
In his first non-fiction work since Fever Pitch, Nick Hornby writes about 31 songs that either have some great significance in his life - or are just songs that he loves. He discusses, among other things, guitar solos and losing your virginity to a Rod Stewart song and singers whose teeth whistle and the sort of music you hear in Body Shop. 
 
'The soundtrack to his life ... a revealing insight into one of Britain's most popular writers' Evening Standard

31 Songs

Leonard Mlodinow

Leonard Mlodinow, the best-selling author of The Drunkard's Walk and coauthor of The Grand Design (with Stephen Hawking) and War of the Worldviews (with Deepak Chopra) here examines how the unconscious mind shapes our experience of the world, and how, for instance, we often misperceive everything from our relationships with family, friends and business associates, the reasons for our investment decisions, to our own past. 
 
Your preference in politicians, the amount of tip you give the waiter-all our judgments and perceptions-reflect the workings of our mind on two levels, the conscious, of which we are aware, and the unconscious, which is hidden from us. The latter has long been the subject of speculation, but over the past two decades scientific researchers have developed remarkable new tools for probing the hidden, or subliminal, workings of the mind. The result of this explosion of research is a new science of the unconscious, and a sea change in our understanding of how the mind affects the way we live. 
These cutting-edge discoveries have revealed that the way we experience life-our perception, behavior, memory, and social judgment-is largely driven by the mind's subliminal processes and not by the conscious ones, as we have long believed. Employing his trademark wit and his lucid, accessible explanations of the most obscure scientific subjects, Leonard Mlodinow takes us on a tour of this research, unraveling the complexities of the subliminal self, increasing our understanding of how the human mind works, and how we interact with friends, strangers, spouses and coworkers. In the process he changes our view of ourselves and the world around us. 
 
Leonard Mlodinow received his PhD in theoretical physics from the University of California, Berkeley, was an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the Max Planck Institute, and now teaches at the California Institute of Technology. His previous books include War of the Worldviews (with Deepak Chopra); the two national best sellers The Grand Design (with Stephen Hawking) and The Drunkard's Walk (a New York Times Notable Book and short-listed for the Royal Society Prize for Science Books); Feynman's Rainbow; and Euclid's Window. He also wrote for the television series MacGyver and Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Subliminal

The New Unconscious and What it Teaches Us

Allen Carr

Following the enormous success of his bestselling Easy Way to Stop Smoking, Allen Carr provides smokers with the motivation to break free from addiction for ever. 
 
This book will help you: 
 
- Achieve the right frame of mind to quit 
- Avoid weight gain 
- Quit without dependence on rules or gimmicks 
- Enjoy the freedom and choices that non-smokers have in life 
- Quit without willpower 
 
It's time to begin your new life as a non-smoker.

The Only Way to Stop Smoking Permanently

Quit cigarettes for good with this groundbreaking method

Caleb Scharf

We have long understood black holes to be where the universe as we know it comes to an end - huge bodies so destructive that not even light can escape their deadly power. In Gravity's Engines, however, renowned astrophysicist Caleb Scharf reveals an entirely new, and crucially important, side to these mysterious chasms. 
 
The latest research has located super-sized black holes, often billions of times more massive than the Sun, which have the power to rearrange the cosmos and control entire galaxies of stars. Engaging with our deepest questions about our origins, Scharf shows how, without these black holes, life in the universe could not exist.

Gravity's Engines

The Other Side of Black Holes

Flora Schreiber

'How are you today?' the doctor asked. 'I'm fine', was the reply. 'But Sybil isn't. She was so sick she couldn't come. So I came instead.' 
 
A collaboration between journalist Flora Rheta Schreiber and Sybil's psychiatrist, Dr. Cornelia Wilbur, Sybil is the story of a woman with sixteen separate personalities, and was instrumental in influencing the definition and diagnosis of multiple personality disorder. 
 
Sybil's diagnosis has since been called into question - but, forty years after it was first published, her story remains a gripping and disturbing account of one woman's struggle for mental stability and happiness.

Sybil

The True Story of a Woman Possessed by Sixteen Separate Personalities

Lawrence Potter

'If you follow this eloquently written book you will be equipped to cope with all manner of challenges, such as splitting a restaurant bill, filling in a tax return, or understanding the compound interest on your bank statement. You will also be able to calculate your chances of survival when playing Russian roulette, win at Perudo and pronounce '324' in Tibetan ('Gsum-bryga gnyis-bcu rtsa bzhi')... Plus there is a section on how the ancient Egyptians wrestled with equations; a 13-page appendix on how to solve Sudoku and a chapter on the Law of Large Numbers which offers useful tips on backing the right horses.' Daily Telegraph 
 
In this irreverent guide to classroom horrors such as algebra, percentages and probability, maths teacher Lawrence Potter sheds light on the dark mysteries that have haunted you since your childhood. Full of fascinating examples and surprising puzzles, Mathematics Minus Fear demonstrates that maths is not an isolated realm of abstract thought but has fascinating connections with the world we encounter on a daily basis.

Mathematics Minus Fear

David Gillespie

David Gillespie was fat, lethargic, the father of six kids under nine - and had failed at every diet out there. But when he cut out sugar he started to lose weight dramatically, and kept it off. Slim, with new reserves of energy, David set out to investigate the connection between sugar, our soaring obesity rates and some of the more worrying diseases of the twenty-first century. 
Part personal story, part self-help and part exposé of the food manufacturing industry, this is a must-read for those on the endless treadmill of dieting and weight gain.

Sweet Poison

Learn how to break your addiction with sugar for life

Lyn Macdonald

On the face of it', writes Lyn Macdonald, 'no one could have been less equipped for the job than these gently nurtured girls who walked straight out of the Edwardian drawing-rooms into the manifest horrors of the First World War...' 
 
Yet the volunteer nurses rose magnificently to the occasion. In leaking tents and draughty huts they fought another war, a war against agony and death, as men lay suffering from the pain of unimaginable wounds or diseases we can now cure almost instantly. 
 
It was here that young doctors frantically forged new medical techniques - of blood transfusion, dentistry, psychiatry and plastic surgery - in an attempt to save soldiers shattered in body or spirit. And it was here that women achieved a quiet but permanent revolution, by proving beyond question they could do anything. 
 
All of this is superbly captured in The Roses's of No Man's Land, a panorama of hardship, disillusion and despair, yet also of endurance and supreme courage.

The Roses of No Man's Land

David Gillespie lost 40kg when he cut sugar from his diet. He did not have to count calories, measure ingredients or follow complex exercise plans. The approach was simple: eat what you like, when you like, but don't eat sugar. 
 
With this accessible diet plan, you will:	 
 
	- understand why sugar makes us fat and damages our health	 
	- break your addiction to sugar 
- interpret confusing food labels	 
- eliminate cravings 
 
With delicious recipes for sugar-free treats, the latest scientific research and easy-to-follow advice, this is the most sensible guide to losing weight and improving well-being you're ever likely to read.

The Sweet Poison Quit Plan

How to kick the sugar habit and lose weight fast

Professor Dame Sally Davies

Jonathan Grant

Mike Catchpole

This is a story that affects us all: our friends, our family and our children. Antibiotics add, on average, 20 years to everyone's lives. Since the manufacture of penicillin in 1943, for over 70 years we have survived extraordinary operations and life-threatening infections. We are so familiar with these wonder drugs that we take them for granted. The truth is that we have been abusing them: as patients; as doctors; as travellers; in our food. 
 
No new class of antibiotic has been discovered for 26 years and the bugs are fighting back. If we do not take action now, in a few decades we may start dying from the most commonplace of ailments that can today be treated easily. This book is vital in raising awareness for the future health of our children and our grandchildren.

The Drugs Don't Work

A Global Threat

Susannah Cahalan

Brain on Fire is the stunning debut from journalist and author Susannah Cahalan, recounting the real-life horror story of how a sudden and mysterious illness put her on descent into a madness for which there seemed to be no cure 
 
'My first serious blackout marked the line between sanity and insanity. Though I would have moments of lucidity over the coming days and weeks, I would never again be the same person ...' 
 
Susannah Cahalan was a happy, clever, healthy twenty-four-year old. Then one day she woke up in hospital, with no memory of what had happened or how she had got there. Within weeks, she would be transformed into someone unrecognizable, descending into a state of acute psychosis, undergoing rages and convulsions, hallucinating that her father had murdered his wife; that she could control time with her mind. Everything she had taken for granted about her life, and who she was, was wiped out. 
 
This is Susannah's story of her terrifying descent into madness and the desperate hunt for a diagnosis, as, after dozens of tests and scans, baffled doctors concluded she should be confined in a psychiatric ward. It is also the story of how one brilliant man, Syria-born Dr Najar, finally proved - using a simple pen and paper - that Susannah's psychotic behaviour was caused by a rare autoimmune disease attacking her brain. His diagnosis of this little-known condition, thought to have been the real cause of devil-possessions through history, saved her life, and possibly the lives of many others. Cahalan takes readers inside this newly-discovered disease through the progress of her own harrowing journey, piecing it together using memories, journals, hospital videos and records. Written with passionate honesty and intelligence, Brain on Fire is a searingly personal yet universal book, which asks what happens when your identity is suddenly destroyed, and how you get it back. 
 
'With eagle-eye precision and brutal honesty, Susannah Cahalan turns her journalistic gaze on herself as she bravely looks back on one of the most harrowing and unimaginable experiences one could ever face: the loss of mind, body and self ... a mesmerizing story', Mira Bartók, New York Times bestselling author of The Memory Palace 
 
Susannah Cahalan is a reporter on the New York Post, and the recipient of the 2010 Silurian Award of Excellence in Journalism for Feature Writing. Her writing has also appeared in the New York Times, and is frequently picked up by the Daily Mail, Gawker, Gothamist, AOL and Yahoo among other news aggregrator sites.

Brain On Fire: My Month of Madness

Carl Hart

As a youth, Carl Hart didn't see the value of school, studying just enough to keep him on the basketball team. At the same time, he was immersed in street life, dealing drugs and committing petty larceny. Today, he is a cutting-edge neuroscientist whose landmark, controversial research is redefining our understanding of addiction. 
 
In this provocative and eye-opening memoir, he recalls his journey of self-discovery, how he escaped a life of crime and drugs and avoided becoming one of the crack addicts he now studies. Interweaving past and present, Hart goes beyond the hype as he examines the relationship between drugs and pleasure, choice, and motivation, both in the brain and in society. His findings shed new light on common ideas about race, poverty, and drugs and explain why current policies are failing. But while Hart escaped the ghetto, he has not turned his back on it. Determined to make a difference, he tirelessly applies his science to help save real lives. But balancing his former street life with his achievements today has not been easy-a struggle he reflects on publicly for the first time.

High Price

Drugs, Neuroscience, and Discovering Myself

Samantha Logan

Intermittent fasting, also known as the 5:2 diet, has become incredibly popular in recent months. And with good reason - it works! By reducing your calorie intake for just 2 days a week, you will reset your metabolism and rev up your body's fat-burning ability to cause dramatic weight loss without deprivation. 
 
This book is the key to learning what to eat on these low-calorie fasting days. With delicious dishes like Cinnamon-Swirl Pancakes for breakfast, Fast-astic French Onion Soup for lunch and Slow-Cooking Provence Chicken for dinner, which are all easy to make and packed with flavour, you won't even realise you're dieting. 
 
There's even a special "dessert" section in the back that will give you low-calorie rewards to look forward to on non-fasting days.

The 5:2 Fast Diet Cookbook

Easy low-calorie & fat-burning recipes for fast days

Michael Middleditch

Michael Middleditch has revised and updated his hugely successful LONDON MAPGUIDE - first published in 1983 and now in its eighth edition. Streets and sights are mapped and named, and there is a full index so that it can be used like the London A-Z. In addition, famous landmarks, places of entertainment etc are indicated on the maps. This edition has a brand-new spread on London architecture, and the Stratford Olympic area is fully incorporated into the book. 
 
At 72 pages of full colour maps this is the perfect book for every tourist and city-dweller.

The London Mapguide (8th Edition)

Sebastian Seung

Connectome, by Sebastian Seung is 'One of the most eagerly awaited scientific books of the year ... intellectually exhilarating, beautifully written, exquisitely precise yet still managing to be inspirational' Irish Times 
 
What really makes us who we are? In this groundbreaking book, pioneering neuroscientist Sebastian Seung shows that our identity does not lie in our genes, but in the connections between our brain cells - our own particular wiring, or 'connectomes'. 
 
Everything about us - emotions, thoughts, memories - is encoded in these tangled patterns of neural connections, and now Seung and a dedicated team are mapping them in order to uncover the basis of personality, explain disorders such as autism and depression, and even enable us to 'upload' our brains. This book reveals the secrets of the brain, showing how our connectome makes each of us uniquely ourselves. 
 
'With the first-person flavour of James Watson's Double Helix, Connectome gives a sense of the excitement on the cutting edge of neuroscience' New Scientist 
 
'Witty and exceptionally clear ... beautifully explained ... the best lay book on brain science I've ever read' Wall Street Journal 
 
'Seung is about to revolutionise brain science' The Times 
 
'The reader is swept along with his enthusiasm' The New York Times 
 
Sebastian Seung is Professor of Computational Neuroscience at MIT and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He has made important advances in robotics, neuroscience, neuroeconomics, and statistical physics. His research has been published in leading scientific journals, and also featured in The New York Times, Technology Review, and The Economist.

Connectome

How the Brain's Wiring Makes Us Who We Are

Read this book and flying will become a happy, stress-free experience for life. 
 
The unique method: 
* Removes the root of the fear, not just the symptoms 
* Dispels all the most common flying fears 
* Reveals the truth behind media scare stories 
* Packed with tips to help you on your next flight 
 
Allen Carr, author of the world's bestselling guide to stopping smoking, uses his unique approach to help make flying an enjoyable part of your work or holiday. 
 
By the time you have finished reading this book you will be looking forward to taking your next flight. 
 
A happy Amazon customer says: 
'I still can't believe that something as simple as reading a book could allay what had pretty much become a phobia, but I can assure you it really does work. I consider myself CURED!'

The Easy Way to Enjoy Flying

The life-changing guide to cure your fear of flying once and for all

Robert Macfarlane

Following the tracks, holloways, drove-roads and sea paths that form part of a vast ancient network of routes criss-crossing the British Isles, Robert Macfarlane discovers a lost Britain - a landscape of the feet and the mind, of pilgrimage and ritual, of stories and ghosts; above all, the places and journeys which inspire and live inside our imaginations.

The Old Ways

A Journey on Foot

Jim Stynes

In July 2009, Jim Stynes was diagnosed with cancer and given less than a year to live. The diagnosis caught him by surprise - he was 42, healthy, fit - and he didn't have time for illness: he was director of a foundation for young people, president of Melbourne Football Club, father of two primary school-aged kids, husband of Sam. Knowing his odds weren't good, but with so much to lose, Jim put everything he had into trying to beat the disease. 
 
He was well equipped to beat the odds - he'd been getting the most out of himself in every aspect of life since his childhood in Dublin. Jim's ability to use mind over matter and his will to succeed gave him two extra years on the prognosis. He had more than 25 tumours removed from his brain and stomach, and defied expectations time and time again. 
 
This book is Jim's legacy. Unflinching in its detail, Jim talks about what he found out about himself when things were at their worst - about what really counts when you're stacking it all up. It's a moving, inspiring story of a life lived fearlessly.

My Journey

Darian Leader

If the post-war period was called the 'Age of Anxiety' and the 1980s and '90s the 'Antidepressant Era', we now live in Bipolar times. Mood-stabilising medication is routinely prescribed to adults and children alike, with child prescriptions this decade increasing by 400% and overall diagnoses by 4000%. 
 
What could explain this explosion of bipolarity? Is it a legitimate diagnosis or the result of Big Pharma marketing? Exploring these questions, Darian Leader challenges the rise of 'bipolar' as a catch-all solution to complex problems, and argues that we need to rethink the highs and lows of mania and depression. 
 
What, he asks, do these experiences have to do with love, guilt and rage? Why the spending sprees and the intense feeling of connection with the world? Why the confidence, the self-esteem and the sense of a bright future that can so swiftly turn into despair and dejection? 
 
Only by looking at these questions in a new way will we be able to understand and help the person caught between feelings that can be so terrifying and so exhilarating, so life-affirming yet also so lethal. 
 
Strictly Bipolar is essential reading for anyone interested in contemporary views of the self, bipolarity and a deeper understanding of manic-depression.

Strictly Bipolar

Frances Ashcroft

'A wonderful book' Bill Bryson 
 
'Ashcroft achieves the sort of rich simplicity most science writers can only dream about ... this book carries the eponymous spark of life' Sunday Telegraph 
 
From before birth to the last breath we draw, from consciousness to sexual attraction, fighting infection to the beating of our hearts, electricity is essential to everything we think and do. 
 
In The Spark of Life award-winning physiologist Frances Ashcroft reveals the secrets of ion channels, which produce the electrical signals in our cells. Can someone really die of fright? How do cocaine, LSD and morphine work? Why do chilli peppers taste hot? Ashcroft explains all this and more with wit and clarity. Anyone who has ever wondered about what makes us human will find this book a revelation. 
 
'A rare gift for making difficult subjects accessible and fascinating' Bill Bryson 
 
'She communicates complex science with engaging passion and eloquence' Helen Dunmore, Observer 
 
'Compelling and very readable, an excellent writer' Literary Review 
 
'Riveting ... she has a stock of good tales' New Scientist 
 
'Lively, conversational prose, refreshingly accessible to any lay reader ... a positively charged little book' Daily Telegraph 
 
Frances Ashcroft is Professor of Physiology at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Trinity College Oxford. She is also Director of OXION, a consortium of scientists studying ion channels, the heroes of this book. Her scientific research focuses on how a rise in your blood sugar level stimulates the release of insulin and what why this process goes wrong in diabetes. She has won many prizes for her research, most recently the L'Oreal/UNESCO 2012 Women in Science award. She is also a recipient of the Lewis Thomas Prize for Science Writing for The Spark of Life. Her first book for the general reader was Life at the Extremes: The Science of Survival.

The Spark of Life

Electricity in the Human Body

Callum Roberts

'Thrilling' Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall 
 
'Authoritative and furious, urgent and persuasive' Sunday Times 
 
'Compelling ... Roberts is that precious pearl: a practising scientist who not only knows his field inside out, but also understands how to write' Guardian 
 
Oceans are the most mysterious places on earth. Their depths remain largely unexplored, yet ninety-five percent of the planet's habitable space lies within them. And now the life they support is in the balance. 
 
Callum Roberts uses his lifetime's experience working with the oceans to take us on a panoramic tour beneath the seas, exploring the richness of life in the deep and how it has altered over the centuries. He shows the catastrophic impact of humanity on the oceans, but also how we can restore them to life. 
 
'For anyone who loves the sea, Ocean of Life is a wake-up call, an urgent alert' Daily Mail 
 
'At the heart of this book is a deep love of the ocean and a profound concern for its viability as a resource for us all' Nature 
 
'An impressive history ... one of this book's strengths is the many solutions Roberts outlines' Financial Times

Ocean of Life

Nate Silver

Every time we choose a route to work, decide whether to go on a second date, or set aside money for a rainy day, we are making a prediction about the future. Yet from the financial crisis to ecological disasters, we routinely fail to foresee hugely significant events, often at great cost to society. 
 
In The Signal and the Noise, the New York Times political forecaster Nate Silver, who accurately predicted the results of every single state in the 2012 US election, reveals how we can all develop better foresight in an uncertain world. From the stock market to the poker table, from earthquakes to the economy, he takes us on an enthralling insider's tour of the high-stakes world of forecasting, showing how we can use information in a smarter way amid a noise of data - and make better predictions in our own lives.

The Signal and the Noise

The Art and Science of Prediction

Clare Balding

'I had spent most of my childhood thinking I was a dog, and suspect I had aged in dog years. By the time I was ten I had discovered the pain of unbearable loss. I had felt joy and jealousy. Most important of all, I knew how to love and how to let myself be loved. All these things I learnt through animals. Horses and dogs were my family and my friends. This is their story as much as it is mine' 
 
Clare Balding grew up in a rather unusual household. Her father a champion trainer, she shared her life with more than 100 thoroughbred racehorses, mares, foals and ponies, as well as an ever-present pack of boxers and lurchers. As a toddler she would happily ride the legendary Mill Reef and take breakfast with the Queen. 
 
She and her younger brother came very low down the pecking order. Left to their own devices, they had to learn life's toughest lessons through the animals, and through their adventures in the stables and the idyllic Hampshire Downs. From the protective Candy to the pot-bellied Valkyrie and the frisky Hattie, each horse and each dog had their own character and their own special part to play. 
 
The running family joke was that "women ain't people". Clare has to prove them wrong, to make her voice heard - but first she had to make sure she had something to say. 
 
My Animals and Other Family is a funny, brave, tender story of self-discovery.

My Animals and Other Family

Irvin D. Yalom

Love's Executioner offers us the humane and extraordinary insight of renowned psychiatrist Irvin D. Yalom into the lives of ten of his patients - and through them into the minds of us all 
 
Why was Saul tormented by three unopened letters from Stockholm? What made Thelma spend her whole life raking over a long-past love affair? How did Carlos's macho fantasies help him deal with terminal cancer? 
 
In this engrossing book, Irvin Yalom gives detailed and deeply affecting accounts of his work with these and seven other patients. Deep down, all of them were suffering from the basic human anxieties - isolation, fear of death or freedom, a sense of the meaninglessness of life - that none of us can escape completely. And yet, as the case histories make touchingly clear, it is only by facing such anxieties head on that we can hope to come to terms with them and develop. Throughout, Dr Jalom remains refreshingly frank about his own errors and prejudices; his book provides a rare glimpse into the consulting room of a master therapist. 
 
'Dr Yalom demonstrates once again that in the right hands, the stuff of therapy has the interest of the richest and most inventive fiction' Eva Hoffman, New York Times 
 
'These remarkably moving and instructive tales of the psychiatric encounter bring the reader into novel territories of the mind - and the landscape is truly unforgettable' Maggie Scarf 
 
'Love's Executioner is one of those rare books that suggests both the mystery and the poetry of the psychotherapeutic process. The best therapists are at least partly poets. With this riveting and beautifully written book, Irvin Yalom has joined their ranks' Erica Jong 
 
'Dr Yalom offers a valuable insight into the delicate process of therapy' Sunday Telegraph 
 
'Dr Yalom is unusually honest, both with his patients and about himself' Anthony Storr 
 
'Yalom is a gifted storyteller, and from the sound of these tales, a no-less-gifted psychotherapist' Los Angeles Times

Love's Executioner

In Silt, bestselling travel writer Robert Macfarlane walks the Broomway, the deadliest path in Britain. In one of the most striking chapters of his brilliant recent book The Old Ways, Robert Macfarlane walks the Essex offshore path which has claimed the lives of more than sixty people over the centuries. His companion on this atmospheric and potentially perilous journey is his old friend and photographer, David Quentin. 
 
Now, in this special e-book edition, the Broomway section of The Old Ways appears alongside a run of twenty-two photographs taken that day by David, which form a haunting counterpoint to the text itself. In a newly written afterword, David reflects on the walk, on Robert Macfarlane's writing and on the fascinating legal terrain which paths like this one traverse even as they cross the land itself.

Silt

Andrew Blum

The Internet. Home to the most important and intimate aspects of our lives. Our careers, our relationships, our selves, all of them are out there - online. So ... where is that exactly? And who's in charge again? And what if it breaks? 
 
In Tubes Andrew Blum takes us on a gripping backstage tour of the real but hidden world of the Internet, introducing us to the remarkable clan of insiders and eccentrics who own, design and run it everyday. He uncovers the secret data warehouses where our online selves are stored, peels back the wires that transport us across the globe, reveals its mammoth hubs and surprising alley-ways, explaining what the Internet actually is, where it is, how it got there - and, yes, what happens when it breaks.

Tubes

Behind the Scenes at the Internet

George Dyson

George Dyson's fascinating account of the early years of computers: Turing's Cathedral is the story behind how the PC, ipod, smartphone and almost every aspect of modern life came into being. 
 
In 1945 a small group of brilliant engineers and mathematicians gathered at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, determined to build a computer that would make Alan Turing's theory of a 'universal machine' reality. Led by the polymath émigré John von Neumann, they created the numerical framework that underpins almost all modern computing - and ensured that the world would never be the same again. 
 
George Dyson is a historian of technology whose interests include the development (and redevelopment) of the Aleut kayak. He is the author of Baidarka; Project Orion; and Darwin Among the Machines. 
 
'Unusual, wonderful, visionary' Francis Spufford, Guardian 
 
'Fascinating . . . the story Dyson tells is intensely human . . . a gripping account of ideas and inventionFascinating . . . the story Dyson tells is intensely human . . . a gripping account of ideas and invention' Jenny Uglow 
 
'Glorious . . . as much a story of the personalities involved as of the discoveries they made, and you do not need any knowledge of computers or mathematics to enjoy the ride . . . a ripping yarn' John Gribbin, Literary Review

Turing's Cathedral

The Origins of the Digital Universe

Dambisa Moyo

Our planet's resources are running out. The media bombards us with constant warnings of impending shortages of fossil fuels, minerals, arable land, and water and the political Armageddon that will result as insatiable global demand far outstrips supply. But how true is this picture? 
 
In Winner Take All, Dambisa Moyo cuts through the misconceptions and noise surrounding resource scarcity with a penetrating analysis of what really is at stake. China, Moyo reveals, has embarked on one of the greatest commodity rushes in history. Tracing its breathtaking quest for resources - from Africa to Latin America, North America to Europe - she examines the impact it is having on us all, and its profound implications for our future.

Winner Take All

China's Race For Resources and What It Means For Us

Jesse J Prinz

We are constantly told that human traits - from aggression to gender differences - are 'hardwired'. In Beyond Human Nature Jesse J. Prinz reveals that it is the societies we live in, not our genes, that determine how we think and feel. From why mental illness differs so widely between cultures to how geography influences morals, from our sexual preferences to how we learn languages, he proves that the vast diversity of behaviour is not ingrained. 
 
This is a book about humanity's power to transcend nature; and one that, ultimately, celebrates our differences.

Beyond Human Nature

How Culture and Experience Shape Our Lives

Miracle

Mischief and Matchmaking

Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children

Mission Survival

Misty Isles Series

Mitchell Symons' Trivia Books

Momo Arashima

Monster Republic

Monster Town

Monsterbook

Monsters at the End of the World

Moomins Fiction

Morgans of Nashville

Mortdecai

Moth the Veggie Vampire

Mr Gum

Mr Gumpy

Mr Majeika

Mrs Pepperpot Picture Books

Ms Rachel

Mummy Fairy

From the bestselling novel I'm Travelling Alone, two dynamic characters are born. 
Police investigators Holger Munch and Mia Krüger work together to solve the most complex crimes in Oslo, catching serial killers before they strike again but their personal lives are not simple either. As people, they could not be more different but as they battle their own demons their unlikely pairing make Munch and Krüger the best kind of classic detective duo.

Filters

Category

Publication Date

Format

Series

Imprint

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter