Danielle Steel is one of the world’s most popular and highly acclaimed authors, with over ninety international bestselling novels in print and more than 600 million copies of her novels sold. She is also the author of His Bright Light, the story of her son Nick Traina's life and death; A Gift of Hope, a memoir of her work with the homeless; and Pure Joy, about the dogs she and her family have loved. 
 
To discover more about Danielle Steel and her books visit her website at www.daniellesteel.com 
 
You can also connect with Danielle on Facebook at www.facebook.com/DanielleSteelOfficial or on Twitter: @daniellesteel

Danielle Steel

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Daniel Bergner

Jacob is a man with an overwhelming attraction to female feet. The Baroness is a clothing designer and evangelical sadist. Roy is a wedding band singer entranced by his step daughter. Ron and Laura are simply in love - only Laura lost both her legs in a car accident, and Ron is beguiled by a beauty many would be blind to. 
 
How do we deal with desire? Our own, and the desires of others? How do we comprehend desires that are extreme, or unacceptable? And how do those who have them, live with them? 
 
In A Map of Desire Daniel Bergner takes us on a journey into human passion suffered, endured, and celebrated. Desire is a sometimes anarchic, sometimes ecstatic, sometimes destructive, sometimes redeeming, and always powerful force.Immersing himself in it through the people whose lives he follows and the scientists he spends time with who are trying to understand it, slowly he exposes and illuminates layers of our humanity.

The Other Side of Desire

Four Journeys into the Far Realms of Lust and Longing

D. W. Winnicott

Between the age of two and five, a little girl nicknamed &lsquo;the Piggle&rsquo; &ndash; seriously disturbed by the birth of a younger sister &ndash; visited Dr Winnicott on sixteen occasions. A verbatim account of her visits is accompanied by illuminating excerpts from letters written to the analyst by the child&rsquo;s parents and an invaluable commentary by Dr Winnicott. This allows the reader to experience in detail the growth of a relationship between child and therapist and the gradual unfolding of the child&rsquo;s inner world. 
 
This classic piece of writing gives the reader the rare opportunity of being admitted to the intimacy of the consulting room and of studying the child and therapist at work. Of special value to professionals working with children, it will also fascinate anyone interested in how psychoanalysis works in practice.

The Piggle

An Account of the Psychoanalytic Treatment of a Little Girl

Adam Phillips

Throughout his brilliant career, Adam Phillips has lent a new and incisive dimension to the art of creative non-fiction, and in so doing revived the form for audiences of the new millennium. Collected here are nineteen pieces that have best defined his thinking - including 'On Tickling', 'On Being Bored' and 'Clutter: A Case History' - along with a selection of new writings and an introduction by Booker prize-winner John Banville. One Way and Another is an affirmation of Phillips's position as one of the most important, imaginative and accessible literary essayists today.

One Way and Another

New and Selected Essays

Naomi Klein

What if you woke up one morning and found you'd acquired a double? Someone almost like you, and yet not you at all? 
 
When Naomi Klein discovered that a woman who shared her first name, but had radically different, harmful views, was getting chronically mistaken for her, it seemed too ridiculous to take seriously. Then suddenly it wasn't. She started to find herself grappling with a distorted sense of reality, becoming obsessed with reading the threats on social media, the endlessly scrolling insults from the followers of her doppelganger. Why had her shadowy other gone down such an extreme path? Why was identity - all we have to meet the world - so unstable? 
 
To find out, Klein decided to follow her double into a bizarre, uncanny mirror world: one of conspiracy theories, anti-vaxxers and demagogue hucksters, where soft-focus wellness influencers make common cause with fire-breathing far right propagandists (all in the name of protecting 'the children'). In doing so, she lifts the lid on our own culture during this surreal moment in history, as we turn ourselves into polished virtual brands, publicly shame our enemies, watch as deep fakes proliferate and whole nations flip from democracy to something far more sinister. 
 
This is a book for our age and for all of us; a deadly serious dark comedy which invites us to view our reflections in the looking glass. It's for anyone who has lost hours down an internet rabbit hole, who wonders why our politics has become so fatally warped, and who wants a way out of our collective vertigo and back to fighting for what really matters.

Doppelganger

A Trip Into the Mirror World

Wensley Clarkson

This is the compelling and disturbing true story of Vanessa George and the evil abuse she doled out upon th children of more than 300 families. 
 
As a nursery worker, wife and mother, she was a figure to place trust in. Yet her adulterous relationship and sick love triangle with Colin Blanchard and Angela Allen drew her into a dark world of violence and sexual abuse. To compete for Blanchard's attention she would do everything in her power to impress him, even if this meant committing unspeakable acts of sexual violence on children as young as two years old. 
 
What could have driven a mother to betray not only her daughters and loving husband but the very families who entrusted her with their children? How could a seemingly caring women become engaged in a sordid and vile love triangle with a man and woman she had never met? Were there events in her own childhood that pushed her to commit these acts? 
 
True crime expert Wensley Clarkson pieces together the events surrounding the case as well as new investigative research to compile a fascinating yet disturbing account of a case which shocked a nation. 
 
We may never know the full extent of Vanessa George's cruelty, but the horror of her story will remain as a chilling memory for generations.

Vanessa

A Portrait of Evil

Jeannette Nelson

How the world’s best actors communicate with gravitas – and how you can, too. 
 
‘The theatre stars’ voice guru’ Daily Mail 
 
Acting is all about charisma. Whether you’re an A-list star or an extra, when you’re on stage you need to perform in a way that makes your audience listen. 
 
That stage presence is something we can all learn from. Every time you speak up in a meeting, recount an anecdote, or tell a joke, it’s essential to communicate with gravitas. 
 
Jeannette Nelson knows a thing or two about gravitas. As Head of Voice at the National Theatre, she has spent three decades working with the world’s leading actors – from Al Pacino to Benedict Cumberbatch to Juliette Binoche – teaching them to speak clearly and move confidently. 
 
Now, Nelson pulls back the curtain on the tricks that professional performers use to own the room. Starting with clear speech and good posture, before moving on to the art of rhetoric and overcoming stage fright, she outlines a holistic three-stage method to communicating with authority, authenticity and eloquence. Throughout, she peppers the book with stories of how world-renowned actors learnt to make themselves heard – and how you can, too. 
 
The result is a fascinating and eminently practical guide to the art of performance. If all the world’s a stage, then this book will turn you into its lead actor.

Centre Stage

Lessons from Actors on the Art of Charisma

Simon Baron-Cohen

'Celebrates human cognitive diversity, and is rich with empathy and psychological insight' Steven Pinker 
 
'Bold, intriguing, profound' Jay Elwes, Spectator 
 
Why can humans alone invent? In this book, psychologist and world renowned autism expert Simon Baron-Cohen puts forward a bold new theory: because we can identify patterns, specifically if-and-then patterns. Baron-Cohen argues that the genes for this unique ability overlap with the genes for autism and have driven human progress for 70,000 years. 
 
From the first musical instruments to the agricultural, industrial, and digital revolutions, Pattern Seekers links one of our greatest human strengths with a condition that is so often misunderstood and challenges us to think differently about those who think differently.

The Pattern Seekers

A New Theory of Human Invention

Paris Lees

NOW A MAJOR BBC SERIES 
 
'Fresh, original, heartbreaking' Reni Eddo-Lodge 
 
'Devastating, hilarious, unlike anything I have ever read. Destined to be a classic' Pandora Sykes 
 
'A must-read ... as mesmerising as it is poignant' Stylist 
 
Thirteen-year-old Byron needs to get away, and doesn't care how. Sick of being beaten up by lads for "talkin' like a poof" after school. Sick of dad - the weightlifting, womanising Gaz - and Mam, who pissed off to Turkey like Shirley Valentine. Sick of all the people in Hucknall who shuffle about like the living dead, going on about kitchens they're too skint to do up and marriages they're too scared to leave. 
 
It's a new millennium, Madonna's 'Music' is top of the charts and there's a whole world to explore - and Byron's happy to beg, steal and skank onto a rollercoaster ride of hedonism. Life explodes like a rush of ecstasy when Byron escapes into Nottingham's kinetic underworld and discovers the East Midlands' premier podium-dancer-cum-hellraiser, the mesmerising Lady Die. But when the comedown finally kicks in, Byron arrives at a shocking encounter that will change life forever. 
 
 Bold, poignant and riotously funny, What It Feels Like For a Girl is the unique, hotly-anticipated and addictively-readable debut from one of Britain's most exciting young writers.

What It Feels Like for a Girl

Nate Silver

In the bestselling The Signal and the Noise, Nate Silver showed how forecasting would define the age of Big Data. Now, in this timely and riveting new book, Silver investigates "The River," or those whose mastery of risk allows them to shape—and dominate—so much of modern life. 
 
These professional risk takers—poker players and hedge fund managers, crypto true-believers and blue-chip art collectors—can teach us much about navigating the uncertainty of the 21st century. By embedding within these worlds, Silver offers insight into a range of issues that affect us all, from the frontiers of finance to the future of AI. 
 
The River has increasing amounts of wealth and power in our society, and understanding their mindset—including the flaws in their thinking—is key to understanding what drives technology and the global economy today. There are certain commonalities in this otherwise diverse group: high tolerance for risk; appreciation of uncertainty; affinity for numbers; skill at de-coupling; self-reliance and a distrust of the conventional wisdom. For the River, complexity is baked in, and the work is how to navigate it, without going beyond the pale. 
 
Taking us behind-the-scenes from casinos to venture capital firms to meetings of the effective altruism movement, On the Edge is a deeply-reported, all-access journey into a hidden world of powerbrokers and risk takers.

On the Edge

The Art of Risking Everything

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

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

'Really made me think about how I think' - Mohsin Hamid, author of Exit West 
 
Tough times don't last. Tough people do. 
 
In The Black Swan, Taleb showed us that highly improbable and unpredictable events underlie almost everything about our world. Here Taleb stands uncer&shy;tainty on its head, making it desirable, even necessary. The antifragile is beyond the resilient or robust. The resil&shy;ient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better and better. 
 
Just as human bones get stronger when subjected to stress and tension, many things in life benefit from stress, disorder, volatility, and turmoil. What Taleb has identified and calls antifragile are things that not only gain from chaos but need it in order to survive and flourish. 
 
Antifragile is a blueprint for living in a Black Swan world. Erudite, witty, and iconoclastic, Taleb's message is revolutionary: the antifragile, and only the antifragile, will make it. 
 
'The hottest thinker in the world' Bryan Appleyard, Sunday Times

Antifragile

Things that Gain from Disorder

Esmé Weijun Wang

'I've inherited a love of a writing and a talent for the visual arts from my mother, as well as her long and tapered fingers; I've also inherited a tendency for madness' 
 
Esmé Weijun Wang was officially diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder in 2013, although the hallucinations and psychotic episodes had started years before that. In the midst of a high functioning life at Yale, Stanford and the literary world, she would find herself floored by an overwhelming terror that 'spread like blood', or convinced that she was dead, or that her friends were robots, or spiders were eating holes in her brain. What happens when your whole conception of yourself is turned upside down? When you're aware of what is occurring to you, but unable to do anything about it? 
 
Written with immediacy and unflinching honesty, this visceral and moving book is Wang's story, as she steps both inside and outside of her condition to bring it to light. Following her own diagnosis and the many manifestations of schizophrenia in her life, she ranges over everything from how we label mental illness to her own use of fashion and make-up to present herself as high-functioning, from the failures of the higher education system to how factors such as PTSD and Lyme disease compounded her experiences. Wang's analytical, intelligent eye, honed as a former lab researcher at Stanford, allows her to balance research with haunting personal narrative. The Collected Schizophrenias cuts right to the core and provides unique insight into a condition long misdiagnosed and much misunderstood.

The Collected Schizophrenias

Jade Angeles Fitton

'I never imagined that the wind would blow me here, to a kind of isolation I have never experienced... There is never anything out here but my shadow, that no one treads on any more' 
 
When Jade's partner leaves the barn that they moved into just weeks before, he leaves a dent in the wall and her life unravelled. Numbed from years in a destructive, abusive relationship, she faces an uncertain future and complete solitude. Slowly, with the help of Devon's salted cliffs and damp forested footpaths, Jade comes back to life and discovers the power of being alone. 
 
As Jade reacclimatizes, she considers what it means to live alone. Through conversations with other hermits across the world, Fitton sheds light on the myriad - and often misunderstood - ways of living alone: from monks to hikikomori, and the largely ignored female hermit. Jade questions whether hermitic living is possible in an era of constant communication and increased housing costs as she finds herself financially unstable and itinerant. She realises that home doesn't exist within walls, but within the landscape of her childhood home county. 
 
Lyrically written, this is an inspirational story of recovery, of finding home, and of celebrating solitude in the natural world.

Hermit

A memoir of finding freedom in a wild place

Elif Shafak

Postnatal depression affects millions of new mothers every year, and – like most of its victims – Elif Shafak never expected to be one of them. But after the birth of her first child in 2006, the internationally bestselling Turkish author remembers how, ‘for the first time in my adult life... words wouldn't speak to me’. 
 
As her despair finally eased, Shafak sought to resuscitate her writing life by chronicling her own experiences. In her beautiful and intimate memoir, she reveals how she struggled to overcome her depression and how literature provided the salvation she so desperately needed.

Black Milk

On Motherhood and Writing

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

Sophia Amoruso

The first thing Sophia Amoruso sold online wasn't fashion. It was a stolen book. At age 17 she was a dumpster-diving, shoplifting anarchist. By 29 she was the founder and CEO of Nasty Gal, a $100 million plus fashion empire. 
 
Filled with brazen wake-up calls ('You are not a special snowflake'), frank observations ('Failure is your invention'), and behind-the-scenes stories from Nasty Gal's meteoric rise, #GIRLBOSS is more than just Amoruso's story, it is a book for anyone seeking a unique path to success - even when that path is winding as all hell and lined with naysayers.

#Girlboss

Angela Findlay

'Fascinating ... an extremely courageous work.' The Lady 
'Absolutely extraordinary ... Findlay reveals a vast, hidden European story that few nations have ever been brave enough to confront' Keith Lowe' 
'Beautifully written, poignant and acutely perceptive' Sinclair McKay 
'Moving and powerful' Julia Samuel 
 
...................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 
In My Grandfather's Shadow is an unflinching, thought-provoking fusion of memoir and history, and an exploration of the hidden scars left across generations by the conflict and horrors of the Second World War. 
 
In a quest to discover the truth about her German grandfather, first a proud Wehrmacht General serving on the Eastern front, then a broken POW on trial for Nazi war crimes, Angela Findlay travels across Europe and Russia to uncover the untold story of millions of Germans long buried not only in guilt and shame but also trauma. 
 
Carefully breaking the silence surrounding so many of World War Two's perpetrators, she challenges widespread binary narratives and offers a way forward that allows the intergenerational wounds to heal and us all to grasp the urgent lessons of the darkest episode in modern history. 
 
Brave, profoundly insightful and moving, In My Grandfather's Shadow is a courageous look at a taboo subject and raises important questions about how and why we should remember the past.

In My Grandfather’s Shadow

A story of war, trauma and the legacy of silence

Kevin Dutton

Our brains are hardwired to sort, categorize and draw lines. It's how we navigate the infinite kaleidoscope of everyday information. But imagine failing an exam by a mere 1 per cent. Or being caught speeding at just 1 mph over the speed limit. It doesn't seem fair. And yet we have to draw the line somewhere, we say, even though lines can be unhelpful or even dangerous when drawn where they aren't wanted, or in too thick a hand. By thinking in terms of ' 'them' or 'us' and 'this' or 'that' we isolate ourselves from ideas we don't agree with and people who are not the same as us. We fail to listen to the other side of the argument and beliefs become increasingly polarized. Intolerance and extremism flourish. While the human race has survived by thinking in black and white and making binary decisions, such thinking might also destroy us. We may not be programmed to think in shades of grey, but it's the colour of our cognitive future. In this ground-breaking exploration of how our brains work, psychologist Professor Kevin Dutton explains that by understanding the nature of our black and white thinking we are better equipped to negotiate life's grey zones. And that, by doing so, we will make subtler and far smarter decisions.

Black and White Thinking

How to outsmart the brain, celebrate nuance, and learn to think in technicolour

The burden of a binary brain in a complex world

R. D. Laing

In &lsquo;The Politics of Experience&rsquo; and the visionary &lsquo;Bird of Paradise&rsquo;, R.D. Laing shows how the straitjacket of conformity imposed on us all leads to intense feelings of alienation and a tragic waste of human potential. He throws into question the notion of normality, examines schizophrenia and psychotherapy, transcendence and &lsquo;us and them&rsquo; thinking, and illustrates his ideas with a remarkable case history of a ten-day psychosis. &lsquo;We are bemused and crazed creatures,&rsquo; Laing suggests. This outline of &lsquo;a thoroughly self-conscious and self-critical human account of man&rsquo; represents a major attempt to understand our deepest dilemmas and sketch in solutions. 
 
&lsquo;Everyone in contemporary psychiatry owes something to R.D. Laing&rsquo; Anthony Clare, the Guardian.

The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise

Kehinde Andrews

Take a step through the looking-glass to a strange land, one where Piers Morgan is a voice worth listening to about race, where white people buy self-help books to help them cope with their whiteness, where Boris Johnson and Donald Trump are seen by the majority of the population as 'the right (white) man for the job'. Perhaps you know it. All the inhabitants seem to be afflicted by serious delusions, like that racism doesn't exist and if it does it can be cured with a one-hour inclusion seminar, and bizarre collective hallucinations, like the widely held idea that Britain's only role in slavery was to abolish it. 
 
But there is a serious side too. Black and brown people suffer from a greater number of mental health difficulties, caused in no small part by living in a racist society. But being Black and brown has itself been pathologized by the young field of psychology. Society cannot face up to the racism at its heart and in its history, so the delusions, irrationalities and hallucinations it conjures up to avoid doing so can only best be described as a psychosis, and the costs are being borne by the sons and daughters of that racist history. 
 
Kehinde Andrews is your piercing, wry and not a little funny guide back to sanity, unpicking the absurd and outrageous lies society tells to keep up the status quo and The Psychosis of Whiteness is your lifeboat out of this topsy-turvy world.

The Psychosis of Whiteness

Surviving the Insanity of a Racist World

Daniel Levitin

Dividing the sum total of human musical achievement, from Beethoven to The Beatles, Busta Rhymes to Bach, into just six fundamental forms, Levitin illuminates, through songs of friendship, joy, comfort, knowledge, religion and love, how music has been instrumental in the evolution of language, thought and culture. And how, far from being a bit of a song and dance, music is at the core of what it means to be human. 
 
A one-time record producer, now a leading neuroscientist, Levitin has composed a catchy and startlingly ambitious narrative that weaves together Darwin and Dionne Warwick, memoir and biology, anthropology and a jukebox of anecdote to create nothing less than the ' soundtrack of civilisation' .

The World in Six Songs

How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature

Paul Broks

A man's wife dies. What next? The next day is next, and the next, and so on. He smothers his sorrow and gets on with the days. He's a Stoic. Tranquillity is the goal, but his brain won't rest. As a neuropsychologist he has spent a career trying to fathom the human brain but now, he comes to realize, his brain is struggling to make sense of him - probing, doubting, reconstructing. 
 
Combining neurological case stories and memoir, and with excursions into speculative fiction and mythology, this is an audaciously original, deeply personal meditation on grief, time and selfhood.

The Darker the Night, the Brighter the Stars

A Neuropsychologist's Odyssey

Ben Platts-Mills

In Tell Me the Planets, Ben Platts-Mills shares stories about his remarkable work with survivors of brain injury, offering a rare glimpse into the world as seen through their eyes. We meet charismatic Danny, whose criminal past has left him paralysed down one side, but who now helps others worse off than himself; Sid, whose memory for the present lasts only moments; and Liah, who is caught in a battle with the care system threatening to make her homeless. But above all this is the story of the extraordinary friendship between Ben and Matthew, who suffered neurological damage during an operation to remove a cerebral cyst. It is a journey that takes them to the frontiers of science and to the limits of human resilience: when they discover that the cyst is growing again, Matthew is left with an impossible decision to make.

Tell Me the Planets

Stories of Brain Injury and What It Means to Survive

Brett Kahr

What&rsquo;s going on in your head when you go to bed? 
 
We talk about sex increasingly openly today, but when it comes to our most private fantasies it&rsquo;s often a different matter. Here Psychotherapist Brett Kahr examines the little-known world of our sexual imaginations. He has undertaken Britain&rsquo;s biggest every sex survey, with responses from over 19,000 adults, to explore questions such as: 
 
&bull; Why do people fantasize? 
 
&bull; Can our fantasies ever be damaging or dangerous? 
 
&bull; Should we tell our partners about them? 
 
&bull; Do men and women fantasize differently? 
 
&bull; What do our fantasies tell us about ourselves? 
 
This frank and fascinating account will help you understand for the first time what our unspoken desires and secret thoughts really mean. It is a book for anyone interested in human relationships and what makes us tick, opening up the hidden worlds inside all of us.

Sex and the Psyche

The Truth About Our Most Secret Fantasies

D.W Winnicott

Clare Winnicott

This collection brings together some of psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott's most important work contributing to our understanding of the minds of children. The essays range in topic from &quot;The Concept of a Healthy Individual&quot; and &quot;The Value of Depression&quot; to &quot;Delinquancy as a sign of Hope&quot;. All reveal Winnicott's vision of the ways in which the developing self interacts with the family and the larger society.

Home is Where We Start from

Essays by a Psychoanalyst

Hilton Als

'I defy you to read this book and come away with a mind unchanged' - John Jeremiah Sullivan 
 
This is an extraordinary, complex portrait of 'white girls,' an expansive but precise category that encompasses figures more diverse than you might think. With blazing intelligence and insight, Als travels through the last decades of the twentieth century, from Flannery O'Connor's rural South, through Michael Jackson in the Motown years, to Jean Michel Basquiat and the AIDS epidemic in nineties New York, in order to unravel the tangled notions of sexual and racial identity that have led us to where we are today. White Girls is one of the most provocative and original books about the culture of our time.

White Girls

Rachel Botsman

'Brilliantly describes how the established trust framework is undergoing a radical transformation as digital technologies take root in every facet of our lives' Marc Benioff, Chairman &amp; CEO, Salesforce 
 
'Fascinating and well researched...every reader will gain new insights' Geoff Mulgan, Chief Executive, Nesta 
 
'A rare book that will cause you to think deeply about your business, your relationships and your life' Don Tapscott, bestselling author of Wikinomics and Blockchain Revolution 
 
 
TRUST IS FUNDAMENTAL TO EVERY ACTION, EVERY RELATIONSHIP, EVERY TRANSACTION 
 
AND IT MATTERS NOW MORE THAN EVER BEFORE... 
 
From government to business, banks to media, trust in institutions is at an all-time low. But this isn't the age of distrust--far from it. 
 
In this ground-breaking book world-renowned trust expert Rachel Botsman reveals that we are at the tipping point of one of the biggest social transformations in human history. We might have lost faith in institutions and leaders, but millions of people travel in cars with total strangers, exchange digital currencies, or find themselves trusting a bot. We still trust: but not the way we used to. 
 
If we are to benefit from this radical shift, we must understand how trust is built, managed, lost and repaired in the digital age. In the first book to explain this new world, Botsman provides a definitive guide of this uncharted landscape - and explores what's next for humanity.

Who Can You Trust?

How Technology Brought Us Together – and Why It Could Drive Us Apart

Kelsey McKinney

THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER 
 
'Sharp-witted and thoroughly researched . . . McKinney convincingly proves that gossiping is a legitimate part of modern life' The Times 
 
“Can you keep a secret?” 
 
Gossip has been journalist Kelsey McKinney’s full-time job for the past four years. Yet the more time she spent collecting and sharing and thinking about stories as the host of the phenomenally successful podcast Normal Gossip, the more her concept of gossip began to expand. 
 
In You Didn’t Hear This From Me, McKinney offers a delightfully insightful exploration of our obsession with gossip. What even is it, and why is it considered a sin? Why are we so fascinated by celebrity drama and tabloid headlines? How do we use and abuse gossip – and why do we want to do it at all? 
 
From the Epic of Gilgamesh as told by chatbots, to the scandalous betrayals in The Traitors, McKinney dives deep into a range of cultural touchstones and, with juicy morsels of real-life gossip interspersed throughout, captures the heart of gossiping: how enchanting and fun it can be to lean over and whisper something a little salacious into your friend’s ear. 
 
Weaving together journalism, cultural criticism, and memoir, You Didn’t Hear This From Me is a sharp, witty and candid exploration of the irresistible allure of those secrets that are just too tantalising to keep to yourself.

You Didn't Hear This From Me

Notes on the Art of Gossip

Leor Zmigrod

Why do some people become radicalized? Who is most susceptible to ideological thinking? Can we unchain our minds from toxic dogmas? 
 
Drawing on her groundbreaking research, Dr Leor Zmigrod uncovers the hidden mechanisms driving our beliefs and behaviours. She uses the powerful tools of neuroscience to show that our political beliefs are not transient thoughts in our minds, divorced from our bodies – ideologies actually change our neural architecture, our cells. For instance, she demonstrates how a simple card sorting game can reveal your entire approach to life. Cognitive rigidity in such tasks – struggling to adapt to new rules – mirrors the rigidity with which you cling to social and political ideologies. While some individuals are more susceptible to dogmatic thinking than others, all of us can strive to be more flexible. 
 
The Ideological Brain is essential reading in today’s polarized and polarizing world. To foster a more informed, resilient and freer society, we need to zoom into the processes happening inside each of us and learn to spot rigid thinking in ourselves and others. We need to learn to avoid black-and-white thinking and embrace ambiguity. We need to recognize our ability to resist irrational rules and authority. Regardless of your political stance, this book will challenge you to reassess your convictions – and what they are doing to your brain.

The Ideological Brain

How Rigid Beliefs Harm Our Minds & Bodies – And Why It Matters

A Radical Science of Susceptible Minds

Nell Frizzell

'As informative as it is poetic' Dolly Alderton 
'Compassionate, funny and beautifully written' Daisy Buchanan 
 
------------------------------ 
 
Every woman will experience the panic years in some way between her mid-twenties and early-forties. 
 
This maddening period of transformation and personal crisis is recognisable by the myriad of decisions we make - about partners, holidays, jobs, homes, savings, friendships - all of which are impacted by the urgency of the single decision that comes with a biological deadline, the one decision that is impossible to take back; whether or not to have a baby. 
 
But how to stay sane in such a maddening time? How to know who you are and what you might want from life? How to know if you're making the right decisions? 
 
Raw, hilarious and beguilingly honest, Nell Frizzell's account of her panic years is both an arm around the shoulder and a campaign to start a conversation. This affects us all - women, men, mothers, children, partners, friends, colleagues - so it's time we started talking about it with a little more candour. 
 
WHAT READERS ARE SAYING 
 
- 'Loved this book! Highly recommend for any woman (or man!) during the weird time in your 20s' ***** 
- 'Those panicky feelings of being a 24-30 something put into words' ***** 
- 'This book brings forth a sigh of relief. Excellent book that really taps into what so many of us are thinking and feeling, but not saying' *****

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