Len Deighton was born in 1929 in London. He did his national service in the RAF, went to the Royal College of Art and designed many book jackets, including the original UK edition of Jack Kerouac's On the Road. The enormous success of his first spy novel, The IPCRESS File (1962), was repeated in a remarkable sequence of books over the following decades. These varied from historical fiction (Bomber, perhaps his greatest novel) to dystopian alternative fiction (SS-GB) and a number of brilliant non-fiction books on the Second World War (Fighter, Blitzkrieg and Blood, Tears and Folly). 
 
His spy novels chart the twists and turns of Britain and the Cold War in ways which now give them a unique flavour. They preserve a world in which Europe contains many dictatorships, in which the personal can be ruined by the ideological and where the horrors of the Second World War are buried under only a very thin layer of soil. Deighton's fascination with technology, his sense of humour and his brilliant evocation of time and place make him one of the key British espionage writers, alongside John Buchan, Eric Ambler, Ian Fleming and John Le Carré.

Len Deighton

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Karl Deisseroth

Mental illness is one of the greatest causes of human suffering, its nature and origin a long-held mystery. But thanks to new science and technology, our understanding has reached a tipping point. In Connections, Professor Karl Deisseroth intertwines his own breakthrough discoveries with moving case studies from his experience as an emergency psychiatry physician, in order to tell a wider story about the origins of human emotion. 
 
 Addressing some of the most timeless questions about the human condition while illuminating the roots of misunderstood disorders such as depression, psychosis, schizophrenia and sociopathy, Connections transforms the way we understand the brain, and forges a bold new path forward in our understanding of mental health.

Connections

The New Science of Emotion

Malcolm Gladwell

The routine traffic stop that ends in tragedy. The spy who spends years undetected at the highest levels of the Pentagon. The false conviction of Amanda Knox. Why do we so often get other people wrong? Why is it so hard to detect a lie, read a face or judge a stranger's motives? 
 
Through a series of encounters and misunderstandings - from history, psychology and infamous legal cases - Malcolm Gladwell takes us on an intellectual adventure into the darker side of human nature, where strangers are never simple and misreading them can have disastrous consequences. 
 
No one challenges our shared assumptions like Malcolm Gladwell. Here he uses stories of deceit and fatal errors to cast doubt on our strategies for dealing with the unknown, inviting us to rethink our thinking in these troubled times.

Talking to Strangers

What We Should Know about the People We Don't Know

Nell Freudenberger

Helen Clapp is a physics professor. She doesn't believe in pseudo-science, or time travel and especially not in ghosts. So when she gets a missed call from Charlie, her closest friend from university with whom she hasn't spoken in over a year, Helen thinks there must be some mistake. Because Charlie died two days ago. 
 
Then when her young son, Jack, claims to have seen Charlie in their house just the other day, Helen begins to have doubts. 
 
Through the grief of the husband and daughter she left behind, Helen is drawn into the orbit of Charlie's world, slotting in the missing pieces of her friend's past. And, as she delves into the web of their shared history, Helen finds herself entangled in the forgotten threads of her own life. 
 
Lost and Wanted is a searing novel from one of America's most exciting writers about the sacred knottiness of female friendship, the forces which fuse us together and those which drive us apart.

Lost and Wanted

David Shields

Mesmerized and somewhat unnerved by his 97-year-old father's vitality and optimism, David Shields undertakes an original investigation of our flesh-and-blood existence, our mortal being. 
Weaving together personal anecdote, biological fact, philosophical doubt, cultural criticism, and the wisdom of an eclectic range of writers and thinkers - from Lucretius to Woody Allen - Shields expertly renders both a hilarious family portrait and a truly resonant meditation on mortality.

The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead

Sinéad Moriarty

Things are finally looking up for Anna. Seventeen miserable years of marriage to man-child Connor have left her drained and ready for a new start. So when they separate, she couldn't be more thrilled to move in with James, a handsome lecturer who is everything her ex-husband is not: kind, thoughtful, and above all, reliable. 
 
But Anna and James's kids hate living with the loved-up couple and the new set-up. Their teenage daughters - one a studious high achiever and the other a cool rich girl unbothered by grades or exams - have nothing in common. And Anna's wild football-mad nine-year-old son declares war on bookish James. 
 
Nobody said step-parenting was easy; Anna and James are about to find out exactly how complicated it can be. With exes, new partners-of-exes and money all in the mix, home life is fast becoming a minefield and their new-found happiness hangs in the balance. Do they have what it takes to make their blended family work?

Yours, Mine, Ours

Joshua Ferris

Charlie Barnes is a mid-century man devoted to his newspaper and his landline. But Charlie is about to get dragged into our troubled age by his storyteller son, who has a different idea of him than he has of himself. Then there are his other children, his ex-wives, present wife, business clients, friends and acquaintances, all of whom have their competing opinions of Charlie. 
 
A striver, romantic, and thoroughgoing capitalist, he's blindsided by the Great Recession and a dose of bad news. Rethinking his entire life, he starts to wonder: what makes a man real? What makes him good? And how does the story we tell about ourselves line up with the lives that we actually live?

A Calling for Charlie Barnes

Molly McCloskey

When Molly McCloskey was a young girl, her brother Mike - fourteen years her senior - started showing signs of paranoid schizophrenia. By the time Molly was old enough to begin to know him, he was frequently delusional, heavily medicated, living in hospitals or care homes or on the road. 
 
When Molly reached the age Mike was when he became ill, she found herself suffering from deep anxiety and drinking heavily. She knew that schizophrenia runs in families, and at times the anxiety was so bad as to make her wonder about her own sanity. As the years passed, years when Molly - having moved from the US to Ireland - hardly ever saw or heard from her brother, she became deeply curious about his life and about what might have been. Through reading an astonishing archive of letters preserved by her mother and grandmother, and interviewing old friends of Mike's, she began to piece together a picture of his life, before and after the illness struck - the story of how a gifted and well-liked student and athlete was overtaken by a terrible illness that rendered him unrecognizable. 
 
Now, in Circles around the Sun, she tells that story - which is also the story of her own demons and of how a seemingly perfect family slowly fell apart and, in the end, regrouped. It is a work of extraordinary intensity and drama from a wonderfully gifted writer.

Circles around the Sun

In Search of a Lost Brother

Shane Dunphy

Four extraordinary true stories ... 
 
Bobby and Micky, six and four, controlled from beyond the grave by their evil father ... 
 
Mina, seventeen, who has Downs Syndrome, desperate to be like everyone else, falling into the hands of men who abuse her trust ... 
 
Sylvie, a fourteen-year-old mother being pimped by her father ... 
 
Twins Larry and Francey, ten, scarcely human after an upbringing of savage and unimaginable cruelty ... 
 
One inspiring account of how one man got to know these wounded children and tried to give them hope - and a future.

Crying in the Dark

Clare Pooley

Every day at 8:05, Iona Iverson boards the train to go to work. As a seasoned commuter, she knows there are rules that everyone should follow: 
 
· You must have a job to go to 
· Don't consume hot food 
· Always pack for any eventuality 
· You must never speak to strangers on the train 
 
Iona sees the same group of people each day - ones she makes assumptions about, gives nicknames to, but never ever talks to. 
 
But then, one morning, Smart-but-Sexist-Surbiton chokes on a grape right in front of Iona. Suspiciously-Nice-New Malden steps up to help and saves his life, and this one event sparks a chain reaction. 
 
With nothing in common but their commute, an eclectic group of people learn that their assumptions about each other don't match reality. But when Iona's life begins to fall apart, will her new friends be there when she needs them most?

The People on Platform 5

PJ Gallagher

I grew up in a psychiatric experiment crossed with an alcoholic experiment. . . . a place run by two people who were extraordinarily drunk and guarded by a potentially vicious dog with a brain tumour. 
 
PJ Gallagher spent much of his childhood knocking back Lucozade with the local alcoholics in his parents' northside pub. But the chaos that reigned for his first ten years was nothing compared to what happened when - having lost the pub - his mum took in psychiatric patients from the local hospital to give them 'care in the community'. Now it was a household of ten - PJ, his sister, his parents and six lost souls. Worst. Idea. Ever. 
Madhouse is PJ's riotous life story. Being a kid while the adults around you are usually drunk, throwing house Masses or taking you to Camp Jesus instead of Trabolgan. Struggling at school, leaving early and discovering a talent for comedy. Making iconic TV shows like Naked Camera and The Young Offenders. Finally, finding a home in radio. 
 
Covering everything from dogs, motorbikes and the art of small talk, to the lessons of mental breakdown and finally figuring out love, this is PJ unbound. Most surprising - to PJ more than anyone - is the prospect of becoming a dad in his late forties, when he always thought of 'family' as a trap. 
 
Madhouse is the funny, insightful and moving story of someone just trying to keep his head above water - and how he is making sense of it all at last!

Madhouse

The naked truth about my chaotic childhood, losing my mind and finding a place to call home

Beechy Colclough

An alcoholic until the age of 34, he then became a highly trained counsellor on addiction and runs the Prom recovery centre in Kent, where he treats alcoholics, drug addicts and people with eating disorders. Thus he would say he's been in the business of alcoholism for 43 years - only the first 43 he was all for it.

The Effective Way to Stop Drinking

Aingeala Flannery

In the seaside town of Tramore, County Waterford, visitors arrive in waves with the tourist season, reliving the best days of their childhoods in its caravan parks, chippers and amusement arcades. 
 
Local teenager Helen Grant is indifferent to the charm of her surroundings; she dreams of escaping to art college with her glamorous classmate Stella Swaine and, from there, taking on the world. But leaving Tramore is easier said than done. Though they don't yet know it, Helen and Stella's lives are pulled by tides beyond their control. 
 
Following the Grant and Swaine families and their neighbours over three decades, The Amusements is a luminous and unforgettable story about roads taken and not taken - and a brilliantly observed portrait of a small-town community.

The Amusements

Charlotte Moore

A new updated edition of the classic book 
 
Charlotte Moore has three children: the two oldest, George and Sam, are autistic; the youngest Jake is not. In this extraordinary book, which combines personal memoir with the most recent known information on this most fascinating and elusive of conditions, she describes the circumstances of their birth, behaviour, diagnosis, treatment - and brilliantly conveys what daily life is like for a family with autism. It's an invaluable book for anyone with an interest in childhood and child development. 
 
George and Sam was published to huge acclaim by Viking Penguin in 2004 - it was immediately regarded as one of the key books on autism. In this new edition Charlotte Moore brings the story up to date by describing the boys' passage through adolescence and its impact on her family.

George and Sam

In this brilliant and provocative book, covering everything from criminology to ketchup, job interviews to dog training, Malcolm Gladwell shows how the most ordinary subjects can illuminate the most extraordinary things about us and our world. 
 
Looking under the surface of the seemingly mundane, he explores the underdogs, the overlooked, the curious, the miraculous and the disastrous, and reveals how everyone and everything contains an incredible story. What the Dog Saw is Gladwell at his very best - asking questions and finding surprising answers.

What the Dog Saw

And Other Adventures

Gavanndra Hodge

When Gavanndra Hodge was seven years old her world was a precarious place. Her father was a hairdresser and drug dealer to Chelsea's most decadent inhabitants; her mother an alcoholic ex-model. So, it was up to Gavanndra to keep her sister safe. 
 
But when Candy dies suddenly on holiday aged nine, Gavanndra's family, already so fragile and damaged, implodes. 
 
With only memories of Candy's awful final moments, Gavanndra embarks on a journey to write her way back to the little girl whose death tore her family apart. 
 
The Consequences of Love is a story of loss and recovery, trauma and memory. It is a joyous and compelling account of the strength of the love between sisters and how nothing is ever truly lost if we are brave enough to return to where we began.

The Consequences of Love

Hannah Azieb Pool

In 1974 Hannah Azieb-Pool was adopted from an orphanage in Eritrea and brought to England by her white adoptive father. She grew up unable to imagine what it must be like to look into the eyes of a blood relative until one day a letter arrived from a brother she never knew she had. Not knowing what to do with the letter, Hannah hid it away. But she was unable to forget it, and ten years later she finally decided to track down her surviving Eritrean family and embarked upon a journey that would take her far from the comfort zone of her metropolitan lifestye to confront the poverty and oppression of a life that could so easily have been her own.

My Fathers' Daughter

Judith Bryan

When Anita finally returns to London after a long absence, everything has changed. 
 
Her father is dead, her mother has disappeared, and she and her sister Beth are alone together for the first time in years. 
 
 They share a house. They share a family. They share a past. 
 
 Tentatively, they reach out to one another for connection, but the house echoes with words unspoken. Can they confront the pain of the past together? 
 
 Dazzling and heart-breaking, Bernard and the Cloth Monkey is a shattering portrait of family, a rebellion against silence and a testament to the human capacity for survival.

Bernard and the Cloth Monkey

A collection of rediscovered works celebrating Black Britain curated by Booker Prize-winner Bernardine Evaristo

Shon Faye

Shon Faye grew up quietly obsessed with the feeling that love was not for her. Not just romantic love: the secret fear of her own unworthiness penetrated every aspect and corner of her life. It was a fear that would erupt in destructive, counterfeit versions of the real love she craved: addictions and short-lived romances that were either euphoric and fantastical, or excruciatingly painful and unhinged, often both. Faye’s experience of the world as a trans woman, who grew up visibly queer, exacerbated her fears. But, as she confronted her damaging ideas about love and lovelessness, she came to realize that this sense of exclusion is symptomatic of a much larger problem in our culture. 
 
Love, she argues, is as much a collective question as a personal one. Yet our collective ideals of love have developed in a society which is itself profoundly sick and loveless; in which consumer capitalism sells us ever new, engrossing fantasies of becoming more loved or lovable. In this highly politicized terrain, boundaries are purposefully drawn to keep some in and to keep others out. Those who exist outside them are ignored, denigrated, exiled. 
 
In Love in Exile, Shon Faye shows love is much greater than the narrow ideals we have been taught to crave so desperately that we are willing to bend and break ourselves to fit them. Wise, funny, unsparing, and suffused with a radical clarity, this is a book of and for our times: for seeing and knowing love, in whatever form it takes, is the meaning of life itself.

Love in Exile

Eimear Ryan

When Beth Crowe starts university, she is shadowed by the ghost of her potential as a competitive swimmer. Free to create a fresh identity for herself, she finds herself among people who adore the poetry of her grandfather, Benjamin Crowe, who died tragically before she was born. She embarks on a secret relationship - and on a quest to discover the truth about Benjamin and his widow, her beloved grandmother Lydia. The quest brings her into an archive that no scholar has ever seen, and to a person who knows things about her family that nobody else knows. 
 
Holding Her Breath is a razor-sharp, moving and seriously entertaining novel about complicated love stories, ambition and grief - and a young woman coming fully into her powers.

Holding Her Breath

From the bestselling author of Blink and The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers: The Story of Success overturns conventional wisdom about genius to show us what makes an ordinary person an extreme overachiever. 
 
Why do some people achieve so much more than others? Can they lie so far out of the ordinary? 
 
In this provocative and inspiring book, Malcolm Gladwell looks at everyone from rock stars to professional athletes, software billionaires to scientific geniuses, to show that the story of success is far more surprising, and far more fascinating, than we could ever have imagined. 
 
He reveals that it's as much about where we're from and what we do, as who we are - and that no one, not even a genius, ever makes it alone. 
 
Outliers will change the way you think about your own life story, and about what makes us all unique. 
 
'Gladwell is not only a brilliant storyteller; he can see what those stories tell us, the lessons they contain' Guardian 
 
'Malcolm Gladwell is a global phenomenon ... he has a genius for making everything he writes seem like an impossible adventure' Observer 
 
 'He is the best kind of writer - the kind who makes you feel like you're a genius, rather than he's a genius' The Times

Outliers

The Story of Success

Ian Clayton

'An astonishing work' - Joanne Harris 
 
Every parent's worst nightmare became a reality for Ian Clayton. On a short holiday break in Hay-on-Wye he took his nine-year-old twins canoeing, and in a freak accident his daughter Billie was drowned. In a remarkably frank and vivid way Clayton describes what happened on that spring day, his desperate attempts to save his two children, and then what it felt like two years later to come face to face with the men who hired out the canoe. 
 
But Our Billie is not a story of bitterness and recrimination. Instead it's the story of how a family attempts to come to terms with something which makes no sense at all. Through his memories of Billie and his wonderfully affectionate portrait of the small town in Yorkshire where the family has lived for generations, he weaves a story of loss and remembering, of gratitude and forgiveness.

Our Billie

Natascha McElhone

Natascha McElhone was away filming in LA, with her two sons and pregnant with her third child when she received news that her beloved husband, Martin, had died suddenly of a heart attack. 
 
Unable to accept this devastating loss, she began writing letters to her husband, telling him how she felt, and how she and her children were adapting to life without him. The result is After You, a triumphant testament to the resilience of the human spirit. It is a profoundly moving tribute to Natascha McElhone's three sons, whose appetite for life led the author through her darkest moments, and to their remarkable father.

After You

Chip Heath

Dan Heath

THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER 
 
'Beautifully written, brilliantly researched' Angela Duckworth, bestselling author of GRIT 
 
'The most interesting, immediately actionable book I&rsquo;ve read in quite a while... If life is a series of moments, the Heath brothers have transformed how I plan to spend mine' Adam Grant, bestselling author of ORIGINALS and OPTION B, with Sheryl Sandberg 
 
In this latest New York Times bestseller by the authors of Switch and Made to Stick, Chip and Dan Heath explore why certain brief experiences can jolt, elevate and change us - and how we can learn to create such extraordinary moments in our own life and work. 
 
What if a teacher could design a lesson that he knew his students would remember twenty years later? What if a doctor or nurse knew how to orchestrate moments that would bring more comfort to patients? What if you had a better sense of how to create memories that matter for your children? Many of the defining moments in our lives are the result of accident or luck - but why leave our most meaningful, memorable moments to chance when we can create them? 
 
In The Power of Moments, Chip and Dan Heath explore the stories of people who have created standout moments, from the owners who transformed an utterly mediocre hotel into one of the best-loved properties in Los Angeles by conjuring moments of magic for guests, to the scrappy team that turned around one of the worst elementary schools in the country by embracing an intervention that lasts less than an hour. 
 
Filled with remarkable tales and practical insights, The Power of Moments proves we all have the power to transform ordinary experiences into unforgettable ones.

The Power of Moments

Why Certain Experiences Have Extraordinary Impact

John O'Donohue

"In this twenty-fifth anniversary edition, you will find John a "soul friend" on your own journey through life, offering support and solace, clarity, and consciousness-expanding narratives that invite you to experience relationships with people, nature, and even your inner world in new ways that nurture well-being and resilience in these challenging times." -Daniel J. Siegel, MD, Neuropsychiatrist and New York Times Bestselling Author 
 
A special twenty-fifth anniversary edition of the classic work of Celtic spirituality and mysticism by beloved poet and philosopher, John O'Donohue, with a new introduction by the President of Ireland, Michael D. Higgins, an afterword by the late author's brother, Pat O'Donohue, and insightful material from O'Donohue's circle of close friends. 
 
In this revered classic, John O'Donohue excavates themes of friendship, belonging, solitude, creativity and the imagination, among many others. Widely recognized for bringing Celtic spirituality into modern dialogue, his unique insights from the ancient world speak with urgency for our need to rediscover the thresholds of the soul. 
 
With lyrical wisdom and fluency, O'Donohue encourages pathways of discovery to come home to the natural rhythm in ourselves in sacred connection with one another and the landscapes we inhabit. This timeless collection nourishes the heart and elevates the spirit. It is "a book to read and reread forever." (Irish Times)

Anam Cara

Spiritual Wisdom from the Celtic World

25th Anniversary Edition

Caitríona Palmer

Caitriona Palmer had a happy childhood in Dublin, raised by loving adoptive parents. When she was in her late twenties, she established contact with her birth mother, Sarah, and they developed a close attachment. But Sarah set one painful condition to this joyous new relationship: she wished to keep it - to keep Caitriona - secret from her family, from her friends, from everyone. 
 
 Who was Sarah, and why did she want to preserve a decades-old secret? An Affair with My Mother tells the story of Caitriona's quest to answer these questions, and of the intense, furtive 'affair' she and her mother conducted in carefully chosen locations around Dublin. By turns heartwarming and heartbreaking, An Affair with My Mother is a beautifully and tenderly written account of a remarkable relationship that has survived seemingly intolerable pressures.

An Affair with My Mother

A Story of Adoption, Secrecy and Love

Rawi Hage

Our unnamed narrator has left his Middle-Eastern home and settled in a chilly, western city. He lives as an exile, untrusted, unwanted, foreign. A stranger trying to make sense of a strange land. 
 
But he brings with him secrets - of a family tragedy that he failed to prevent and a childhood overshadowed by war. And as he wanders snowy streets, falling in love with fellow exile Shoreh, he realizes that to find a place in this alien world it is necessary to become someone else. Someone he never dared to be in his past life . . .

Cockroach

Ann Ingle

At 20 Londoner Ann Ingle fell madly in love with an Irish fellow she met on holiday in Cornwall. At the church to arrange their shotgun wedding she discovered that he hadn't even told her his real name. 
 
Sixty-odd years later Ann looks back and considers what she has learned from the life that followed - bringing eight children into the world, their father's years of mental illness and tragic death at 40, being a cash-strapped single mother in 1980s Dublin, coming into her own in her middle years - going to college, working and writing, and continuing to evolve and learn into her ninth decade, even as she accepts the realities of being 'old'. 
 
Candid about everything that matters - love, sex, heartbreak, money, class, religion, mental health, rearing children (and letting them go), reading and writing, ageing - Openhearted is a compelling story about living life in a spirit of curiosity and delight and with a willingness to look for good in others.

Openhearted

Eighty Years of Love, Loss, Laughter and Letting Go

Malena Ernman

Greta Thunberg

Beata Ernman

Svante Thunberg

This is the story of a happy family whose life suddenly fell apart, never to be the same again. Of two devoted parents plunged into a waking nightmare as their eleven-year-old daughter stopped speaking and eating, and her younger sister struggled to cope. 
 
This crisis was not theirs alone: they were burned-out people on a burned-out planet. 
 
Our House is on Fire is the story of how one family found ways to strengthen, heal, and gain courage from the love they had for each other - and for the living world. It is a parable of hope and determination in an emergency that affects us all.

Our House is on Fire

Scenes of a Family and a Planet in Crisis

Marina Lewycka

'Two years after my mother died, my father fell in love with a glamourous blonde Ukrainian divorcee. He was eighty-four and she was thirty-six. She exploded into our lives like a fluffy pink grenade, churning up the murky water, bringing to the surface a sludge of sloughed-off memories, giving the family ghosts a kick up the backside.' 
 
Sisters Vera and Nadezhda must put aside a lifetime of feuding to save their émigré engineer father from voluptuous gold-digger Valentina. With her proclivity for green satin underwear and boil-in-the-bag cuisine, she will stop at nothing in her pursuit of Western wealth. 
 
But the sisters' campaign to oust Valentina unearths family secrets, uncovers fifty years of Europe's darkest history and sends them back to roots they'd much rather forget...

A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian

Emily Edwards

Two best friends 
 
Elizabeth and Bryony are polar opposites but their unexpected friendship has always worked. They're the best of friends, and godmothers to each other's daughters - because they trust that the safety of their children is both of their top priority. 
 
One little secret 
 
Little do they know that they differ radically over one very important issue. And when Bryony, afraid of being judged, tells what is supposed to be a harmless white lie before a child's birthday party, the consequences are more catastrophic than either of them could ever have imagined. 
 
Every parent's worst nightmare . . .

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