Meik Wiking founded the world's first Happiness Research Institute in 2013, in Copenhagen, Denmark and is a New York Times and Sunday Times Bestselling author. Meik has been called The Indiana Jones of Smiles and probably the World's Happiest Man by The Times. He is the author of four globally bestselling books which have sold over 2 million copies worldwide: The Little Book of Hygge, The Little Book of Lykke, The Art of Making Memories and My Hygge Home.

Meik Wiking

Sue Meikle has always been obsessed with picture books, and after working as an Early Years Specialist for over 25 years, she has read stories to children from Stockport to South Africa. In schools, in early years centres, while on forest school adventures... Sue has even read stories on a travelling play bus! So, perhaps it was always in the stars for Sue to not just read books, but write them, too! When she's not reading or writing stories, Sue can be found walking her dog or chauffeuring her teenagers around the Greater Manchester area (because that’s where they live… in a home that they made from a derelict barn!)

Sue Meikle

David Meikle is a TV scriptwriter and Sunday Times bestselling author. He has written and co-written seven books, including the autobiographies of Charlie Richardson and Bobby Cummines.

David Meikle

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The Economist Publications (PUK Rights)

The Penguin Economist Special reports delve into the most pressing economic issues of the day: from national and global economies, to the impact of trade, industry and jobs. Written to be read on a long commute or in your lunch hour - be better informed in under an hour. 
 
'The line up for next year's change of leadership does not give cause for optimism' says James Miles, the Economist's China correspondent. 
 
With a heavily state owned banking system, waning numbers of workers in a labour intensive industrial economy and lack of development in new business, China's current boom may be set to bust. 
 
In the following sections, James Miles examines the restrictive nature of government in China, and what it will mean for the country and the rest of the world. 
 
Urbanisation: Where do you live? 
 
Rising power, anxious state 
 
China's new leaders: The princelings are coming 
 
Growth prospects: Beware the middle-income trap 
 
Deng &amp; Co 
 
Government's role in industry: The long arm of the state 
 
Demography: Getting on 
 
Ideological battles: Universalists v exceptionalists

The Economist: China

Rising Power, Anxious State

Elif Shafak

Penguin Specials are designed to fill a gap. Written to be read over a long commute or a short journey, they are original and exclusively in digital form. This is Elif Shafak's examination of national identity. 
 
"You know, I never understand. How come their children are so quiet and well disciplined?" 
"Yeah," said the distressed father, his voice suddenly softer. "Blond children never cry, do they?" 
 
As Elif Shafak stands in line at the airport, she overhears a Turkish father expressing to a friend his bewilderment at the cultural differences he's experienced since immigrating to northern Europe. Is it true, she wonders, that the citizens of these countries are genuinely happier? Why do people leave their homes for other countries? And what lessons can we all learn, for the creation of truly harmonious societies, from the experiences of immigrants? 
 
In the light of the recent backlash against multiculturalism and the influx of millions of Muslims into Europe from the east, this powerful and personal essay uses the lived experience of immigrants to examine this most hotly debated subject.

The Happiness of Blond People

A Personal Meditation on the Dangers of Identity

John Garnaut

When news of the murder trial of prominent Communist Party leader Bo Xilai's wife reached Western attention, it was apparent that, as with many events in the secretive upper echelons of Chinese politics, there was more to the story. Now, as the Party's 18th National Congress oversees the biggest leadership transition in decades, and installs the Bo family's long-time rival Xi Jinping as president, China's rulers are finding it increasingly difficult to keep their poisonous internal divisions behind closed doors. 
 
Bo Xilai's breathtaking fall from grace is an extraordinary tale of excess, murder, defection, political purges and ideological clashes going back to Mao himself, as the princeling sons of the revolutionary heroes ascend to control of the Party. China watcher John Garnaut examines how Bo's stellar rise through the ranks troubled his more reformist peers, as he revived anti-'capitalist roader' sentiment, even while his family and associates enjoyed the more open economy's opportunities. Amid fears his imminent elevation to the powerful Standing Committee was leading China towards another destructive Cultural Revolution, have his opponents seized their chance to destroy Bo and what he stood for? The trigger was his wife Gu Kailai's apparently paranoid murder of an English family friend, which exposed the corruption and brutality of Bo's outwardly successful administration of the massive city of Chongqing. It also led to the one of the highest-level attempted defections in Communist China's history when Bo's right-hand man, police chief Wang Lijun, tried to escape the ruins of his sponsor's reputation. 
 
Garnaut explains how this incredible glimpse into the very personal power struggles within the CCP exposes the myth of the unified one-party state. With China approaching super-power status, today's leadership shuffle may set the tone for international relations for decades. Here, Garnaut reveals a particularly Chinese spin on the old adage that the personal is political.

The Rise and Fall of the House of Bo

How A Murder Exposed The Cracks In China’s Leadership

Paul French

The Badlands, a warren of narrow hutongs in the eastern district of pre-communist Peking, had its heyday in the 1930s. Home to the city's drifters, misfits and the odd bohemian, it was a place of opium dens, divebars, brothels, flophouses and cabarets, and was infamous for its ability to satisfy every human desire from the exotically entertaining to the criminally depraved.   These vignettes of eight non-Chinese residents of the precinct  White Russians, Americans and Europeans  bring the Badlands vividly back to life, providing a short but potent account of a place and a way of life until now largely forgotten, but here rendered unforgettable.

The Badlands

Decadent Playground of Old Peking

The Penguin Economist Special reports delve into the most pressing economic issues of the day: from national and global economies, to the impact of trade, industry and jobs. Written to be read on a long commute or in your lunch hour - be better informed in under an hour. 
 
As Western liberalist capitalism flounders in the wake of global recession, state backed companies are slowly taking over. 
 
The melding of the power of the state and the power of capitalism is on the rise. Prevalent in the emerging economies of China, Russia and Brazil, some of the world's most powerful companies are state owned. 
 
The 13 biggest oil firms are government controlled. China Mobile has over 600million customers and the Emirates airlines is growing at 20% a year. 
 
However, despite the numerous successes, Adrian Wooldridge urges caution. He asks whether it could easily survive if confronted with difficulty, criticises the embedded corruption and cronyism and asks whether a fair trading system is possible to maintain with government favoured business. 
 
Slowly but surely, the invisible hand of the market is being usurped by the visible, often authoritarian, hand of state capitalism. 
 
Sections include: 
 
The visible hand 
 
Something old, something new - a brief history of state capitalism 
 
New masters of the universe - how state enterprise is spreading 
 
Theme and variations - state capitalism is not all the same 
 
Mixed bag - infrastructure and innovation 
 
The world in their hands - state capitalism looks outward and inward 
 
And the winner is - fatal flaws

The Economist: State Capitalism

The Visible Hand

Will Self

'Most food writing and restaurant criticism is concerned with the ideal, with how by cooking this, or dining there, you can somehow ingurgitate a new - or at any rate improved - social, aesthetic and even spiritual persona. I aimed to turn this proposition on its head, and instead of commenting on where and what people would ideally like to eat I would consider where and what they actually did: the ready meals, buffet snacks and - most importantly - fast food that millions of Britons chomp upon in the go-round of their often hurried and dyspeptic lives.' 
 
In this selection from his hilarious New Statesman Real Meals column, Will Self reviews the chains where most of us go to eat (KFC, Greggs, Yo! Sushi, Pizza Express and their like), delves into the ubiquitous Thai meal and chicken tikka masala, and experiences hotel breakfasts, frozen tv dinners and airline food on our behalf. These are restaurant reviews of the kind you've never read before.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being a Prawn Cracker

A Selection of Real Meals

John Gapper

Penguin Specials are designed to fill a gap. Written to be read over a long commute or a short journey, they are original and exclusively in digital form. This is John Gapper's foray into the world of rogue traders. 
 
Unlike most bankers, they are household names: Nick Leeson of Barings, Jerome Kerviel of Societe Generale, John Rusnak of Allied Irish Bank. And now the 31 year-old Kweku Adoboli, who allegedly ran up $2.3bn in losses at UBS. These are the men who have bought banks to their knees and global financial systems to a halt. Each time the banks declare themselves to be innocent victims of a fraud. 
 
But why do traders keep on committing apparently senseless crimes, with little benefit apart from higher bonuses and a risk of ending up in prison? And why do banks, which should have learned the tricks of the traders, keep being deceived? 
 
In this Penguin Special, the Financial Times' associate editor John Gapper unlocks the mystery by delving into the evolutionary risk-taking instincts of both humans and animals - from yellow-eyed junco sparrows in Arizona to honey-bees. He reveals how banks encourage their traders to evade risk limits, and shows how the rogue traders merely mimic the strategies used by their firms to seem more profitable than they really are. 
 
A rogue trader is often an outsider who starts in a lowly role and gambles with a bank's money in a bid to become a star. Gapper traces patterns of behaviour and personality that could be used to catch them before disaster strikes. But do the banks really want to? And are the rogue traders just the symptoms of a financial system gone rogue?

How to be a Rogue Trader

Jay Rayner

I have been a restaurant critic for over a decade, written reviews of well over 700 establishments, and if there is one thing I have learnt it is that people like reviews of bad restaurants. No, scratch that. They adore them, feast upon them like starving vultures who have spotted fly-blown carrion out in the bush. 
 
They claim otherwise, of course. Readers like to present themselves as private arbiters of taste; as people interested in the good stuff. I'm sure they are. I'm sure they really do care whether the steak was served au point as requested or whether the soufflé had achieved a certain ineffable lightness. And yet, when I compare dinner to bodily fluids, the room to an S &amp; M chamber in Neasden (only without the glamour or class), and the bill to an act of grand larceny, why, then the baying crowd is truly happy. 
 
Don't believe me? Then why, presented with the chance to buy this ebook filled with accounts of twenty restaurants - their chefs, their owners, their poor benighted front of house staff - getting a complete stiffing courtesy of the sort of vitriolic bloody-curdling review which would make the victims call for their mummies, did you seize it with both hands?

My Dining Hell

Twenty Ways To Have a Lousy Night Out

The Penguin Economist Special reports delve into the most pressing economic issues of the day: from national and global economies, to the impact of trade, industry and jobs. Written to be read on a long commute or in your lunch hour - be better informed in under an hour. 
 
When students graduate from university they are employed in equal numbers. Move up the ladder a few rungs and the number of women in high powered positions has fallen dramatically. 
 
Women make up just 3% of Fortune 500 CEOs and still generally get paid less than their male counterparts. 
 
Barbara Becks ask why this is and what can be done about it. She covers: 
 
Closing the gap 
 
Female labour markets: The cashier and the carpenter 
 
A world of bluestockings 
 
Work and family: Baby blues 
 
Top jobs: Too many suits 
 
Women in China: The sky's the limit 
 
Looking ahead: Here's to the next half-century

The Economist: Women and Work

Closing the Gap

Helen Dunmore

'Tonight it is the concert. Two Prodigies of Nature are coming to play in my lady's ball-room. As soon as the concert begins I understand why the whole world comes to stare and listen.' 
 
Scipio is eleven years old and a lady's page. He plays the harpsichord, speaks French and German, and sings in Italian. But what was appealing and remarkable in a small child is no longer so in a 'hobbledehoy'. And after he meets the two child prodigies, Wolfi and Nannerl, at a concert, Scipio's fate will change forever.

The Land Lubbers Lying Down Below

Felicity Cloake

Penguin Specials are designed to fill a gap. Written to be read over a long commute or a short journey, they are original and exclusively in digital form. 
 
Christmas dinner is perhaps the one meal of the year where even the most relaxed cook feels the pressure of perfection - and, although few menus can be more familiar, it's probably the one we all feel the least confident about. 
 
Cooking Christmas dinner can be stressful, but there's no need to rifle through recipe books, or frantically Google turkey cooking times on Christmas morning as Felicity Cloake has tried and tested recipes from all the greats - from Nigella Lawson and Simon Hopkinson to Delia Smith and Mrs Beeton - and pulled together the best points from each to come up with the ultimate Christmas Day recipe collection. 
 
Based on Felicity's popular Guardian column, Perfect Christmas Day combines invaluable prepping and cooking tips to calm the most frazzled of festive souls and, of course, fifteen delicious recipes. From mulled wine, blinis, stilton soufflés and the perfect prawn cocktail to turkey and gravy, stuffing, sprouts, roast potatoes, pigs-in-blankets, nut roast, and cranberry and bread sauce, to trifle, mince pies and brandy butter, Perfect Christmas Day is all you need to prepare the perfect Christmas dinner.

Perfect Christmas Day

15 Essential Recipes for the Perfect Christmas

Jonathan Coe

When a family celebrates the prize-giving day at their daughter's secondary school, thoughts turn to their own childhoods. The father remembers his living room piano recital, recorded on a well-worn cassette tape. The mother remembers her own father's war tragedy. As the father searches for the physical reminder of his past and the mother longs to forget her own, they confront the breakdown of their marriage in the present. 
 
In Pentatonic, Jonathan Coe movingly explores the memories that unite us and the experiences that drive us apart. The story is simultaneously available as a digital download with the piece of music which originally inspired the story.

Pentatonic

A Story of Music

Alan Beattie

As we watch wave after wave of volatility threaten the global economy, it is tempting to ask, who is in charge here? The answer, journalist and economist Alan Beattie explains, is all too often no one. 
 
The crisis that began with mortgages in American suburbia has now spread around the world from banks to businesses to governments, threatening to bring decades of economic progress to a juddering halt. Globalization's strengths - its speed, breadth, and complexity - have also proved to be weaknesses as the crisis has traveled more rapidly and widely around the globe than the boom, and faster than governments have usually been able to react. 
 
The United States, which has led the global economy since the second world war, has been weakened by political division at home. Like ancient Rome, it has been challenged by an array of upstarts - emerging markets like China, India and Brazil. But just like the tribes that brought down the Roman Empire, the rising powers are strong enough to block American leadership yet not united enough to provide direction of their own. 
 
In Europe, as country after country has slid towards trouble, it has become evident that the eurozone's slow and unwieldy policy frameworks are woefully unfit for dealing with financial crises. As Beattie writes: "It [is] like watching a gang of irascible, quarrelsome architects trying to redesign a house in the middle of a raging fire." 
 
With the penetrating wit for which he is known, Alan Beattie explains how international economic institutions like the IMF can work - and how they often don't. He calls out the more spectacular failures of judgment and leadership, as well as the less frequent bright spots, in handling the crisis, showing how governments scrambled to respond as the ground started to give way.

Who's in Charge Here?

How Governments are Failing the World Economy

The Penguin Economist Special reports delve into the most pressing economic issues of the day: from national and global economies, to the impact of trade, industry and jobs. Written to be read on a long commute or in your lunch hour - be better informed in under an hour. 
 
In the US, the average age of a gamer is 37 and 42% are female. Last year the industry earned $56billion worldwide. 
 
Tim Cross analyses the proliferation of the video games in this Economist special report, and how its successes are set to grow. 
Sections in the report include: 
 
All the world's a game 
 
As you like it 
 
The business of gaming: Thinking out of the box 
 
Paying for pixels 
 
E-sports: Gentlemen, start your computers 
 
Violence and addiction: No killer app 
 
Alternative uses: The play's the thing 
 
The importance of fun: Homo ludens

The Economist: Video Games

All the World's a Game

Alastair Sooke

Whaam! Roy Lichtenstein - architect of Pop art, connoisseur of the comic strip, master of irony and prophet of popular culture. From exhilarating images of ice-cool jet pilots in dog fights, to blue-haired Barbie dolls drowning in scenes of domestic heartache, Lichtenstein's instantly recognisable paintings, with their Ben-Day dots and witty one-liners, defined the art of a generation. But how did a jobbing, unassuming painter of the Fifties become a world-famous Pop artist whose work today sells for millions? What do his paintings really tell us? And what is his legacy? 
 
This book, which can be read in two hours or less, is a perfect introduction to the artist and his work. Spanning Lichtenstein's career, and explaining his unique style, it is a journey through the life of one of the twentieth century's greatest artists.

Roy Lichtenstein

How Modern Art Was Saved by Donald Duck

Mary Mount

This is Sam Frears' story. 
 
This is also the story of an actor, a rock-climber and a man born with an extremely rare genetic disorder only affecting Ashkenazi Jews. Sam was supposed to live to the age of 5. In February, he celebrated his 40th birthday. 
 
Challenged by blindness and a body under great stress, Sam Frears is trying to live an ordinary life under extraordinary circumstances His struggles and triumphs offer an illuminating look at the differences - and similarities - that make us human.

Being Sam Frears

A Life Less Ordinary

Niall Brady

In the summer of 2011, investors with Custom House Capital - some of whom had all their pension savings tied up with the investment house - faced a nightmare: the possibility that their money was gone, and that they wouldn't be getting it back. 
 
Finance journalist Niall Brady takes us behind the scenes for the first in-depth account of a disaster that has cost investors millions. He shows how clients' funds were mis-allocated to cover losses, how the Financial Regulator, though aware of irregularities at CHC for years, failed to forestall the crisis, and how it remains unclear, over a year after the scandal was uncovered, whether people will get their money back. His account of the strange culture and practices of CHC makes House of Cards a must-read for fans of Too Big to Fail and The Big Short.

House of Cards

The Inside Story of the Fall of Custom House Capital

Nick Hornby

'That is why there is NOTHING better than sport' Kevin Pietersen 
 
The 2011-12 Premier League season finished on an afternoon so extraordinary that it prompted Kevin Pietersen's tweet. Yet this was just the climax of an incredible season. By May fans of most clubs had been enthralled, appalled, depressed, elated, shocked and enraged. Along the way football had somehow managed to encompass politics, high finance, the law and matters of life and death. 
 
In Pray Nick Hornby, author of the classic Fever Pitch, offers an entertaining and typically insightful account of this most extraordinary of seasons. Beginning with the weekend of 28 August when the Man Utd demolition of Arsenal 8-2 and the Man City demolition of Spurs 5-1 showed what was to come, he concentrates on a number of games whose significance went beyond the immediate result: the October games with alleged rascist incidents, the fairy-tale return of Thierry Henry, the collapse of Fabrice Muamba, the Carling Cup Final where Liverpool's victory only served to point up the club's problems, the unusual (but increasingly more common) 4-4 draw between Man Utd and Everton... 
 
It was a season of tumultuous incident and enormous entertainment, a season more glorious than most. Read all about it, and relive it, here.

Pray

Notes on the 2011/2012 Football Season

Andrew Lees

Britain like the rest of the developed world is in the grip of a silent plague. Its thousands of victims can no longer make sense of the world and are contained for their own safety in fading Victorian piles and nondescript redbrick detention centres around the country. For them the present is a foreign country and the past a lost continent. 
There are now more people in the UK with Alzheimer's than the population of Liverpool, and four million Americans are reported to have the disease. Longevity is a major factor in the increasing incidence of the disease, with the number of over 65s in the UK having trebled in the last 100 years, and forecast to double again in the next 25 years. 
With such an alarming background, the race to find the causes - and therefore potentially a cure - for Alzheimer's is urgent. In this Penguin Special, Dr Andrew Lees, a world expert on the neurodegenerative diseases, explains what we know, and don't know, about Alzheimer's and its amelioration. The drugs that are currently available do not do enough to help, and the various physical and mental exercises we are encouraged to undertake are unproven. Yet it's not entirely a black picture: scientific endeavour has greatly increased our knowledge of the disease's spread and rate of deterioration, and the composition of the starchy plaques and the mechanism of the bindweed tangles in the brain which are core to the illness are much better understood. 
Alzheimer's is tough even to contemplate. But it represents one of the greatest medical mysteries of our age, and Andrew Lees's book provides a fascinating account of our knowledge of this terrible disease to this point.

Alzheimer's

An Essential Guide to the Disease and Other Forms of Dementia

Colm Tóibín

Penguin Specials are designed to fill a gap. Written to be read over a long commute or a short journey, they are original and exclusively in digital form. This is Colm Tóibín's touching memoir. 
 
A Guest at the Feast moves from the small town of Enniscorthy to Dublin, from memories of a mother who always had a book on the go to the author's early adulthood, from a love of literature to the influences of place and family. Tóibín's captivating memoir is the story of a writer coming of age and his connections between home, work and love. It is a perfect gem of a book.

A Guest at the Feast

A Memoir

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