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A hands-on user’s guide that takes readers step-by-step on a 21-day journey to discover what it means to be truly present and aware in our daily lives. In today’s increasingly fast-paced world it can be difficult to find moments to catch your breath, regain inner balance, and just … be. This simple yet profound guide shows readers how to strengthen their minds by learning to focus attention, open awareness, and develop a positive state of mind — the three pillars of mindfulness practice that research shows lead to greater physical and mental well-being. Packed with guided meditation instructions, practical exercises, and everyday tools and techniques, Becoming Aware offers a simple program to enhance our inner sense of clarity and even our interpersonal well-being.

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A Sunday Independent Book of the Year Against the backdrop of China’s Cultural Revolution and Europe’s sexual revolution, the fates of two families in London and Beijing become unexpectedly intertwined, in this dazzling new novel from the author of Mrs Engels. In London, sisters Iris and Eva plan an attack on the West End theatre where their mother is playing the title role in Miss Julie; in Beijing, Jiang Qing, Chairman Mao’s wife, rehearses a gala performance of her model ballet, which she will use to attack her enemies in the Party. As the preparations for these two performances unfold, these three ‘sisters’ find themselves bound together by the passions of love, by the obsessions of power, and by the forces of history. Exquisitely observed, relevant, and wise, The Sisters Mao shows us that the political is always personal.

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An extraordinary story about a Jewish woman who pretended to be Catholic to survive the Holocaust. Catholics believed she was one of them. A devoted Nazi family took her in. She fell in love with a German engineer who built aeroplanes for the Luftwaffe. But no one knew that Mala Rivka Kizel had been born into a large Orthodox Jewish family. She survived World War II using her charm, intelligence, blonde hair, and blue eyes to assume different identities. Journalist Pieter van Os retraces Mala’s footsteps through Europe to uncover her extraordinary journey and the stories of those who helped her. This poignant, rich book is an engrossing meditation on what drives us to fear the Other, and what in turn might allow us to feel compassion for them.

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'What a spectacular story’ Phoebe Bridgers A buoyant and heartwarming celebration of individuality, identity, and dressing to suit yourself! It’s almost Frankie’s birthday and everything is ready — except for something to wear. All of her party dresses feel wrong. Her family tries to help, but it’s no good. What Frankie longs for is a suit. A spectacular suit … Can Frankie find the outfit of her dreams? The perfect gift for birthday parties, crafters, and children who don’t identify with traditional gender roles Wonderful conversation starter for teachers and librarians to explore gender and identity with age-relevant material from creators whose life experience is reflected in the story

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Something’s up down below ... Urinary tract infections result in 8.1 million visits to a doctor every year, and between 50 per cent and 60 per cent of adult women will have at least one UTI in their lifetime. Meanwhile, overactive bladder affects nearly one in five of the over-40, yet many people wait up to 15 years before seeking treatment. Maybe it’s time we started taking pee a bit more seriously … Home and Dry is the ultimate guide to the bladder; not only will it help you to overcome problems such as recurrent infections or needing the bathroom all the time, it will also inspire wonder for a fascinating part of the body that we usually try to ignore. Using the latest research, Birgit Bulla explores the biggest problem area for women’s health, and shows how taking care of your bladder will make you feel a whole lot better.

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Better sex in ten steps: renowned sex therapist and bestselling author Ian Kerner shares the program he uses to help thousands of couples achieve more intimacy and enjoyment. Think about the last time you had sex. Who initiated it? When and where did it happen? What was off-limits and why? Did you lose yourself in pleasure and connection, or did you come away feeling disappointed, or even ashamed? In this book, Kerner shows you how to create a sex life that works for you. He helps you figure out what’s working, what’s not, where you might be missing some elements, and how to construct a sex life that is mutually satisfying. He also discusses many common sexual problems — such as low desire, issues with climaxing, and erectile unpredictability — and how to resolve them. Drawing on the latest research and informed by his own experience of overcoming sexual problems, he lays out an easy-to-follow step-by-step process that has transformed the lives of his many clients, and can do the same for you.

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The body as a measuring tool for planetary harm. A nervous system under increasing stress. In this urgent collection that moves from the personal to the political and back again, writer, activist, and migrant Jessica Gaitán Johannesson explores how we respond to crises. She draws parallels between an eating disorder and environmental neurosis, examines the perils of an activist movement built on non-parenthood, dissects the privilege of how we talk about hope, and more. The synapses that spark between these essays connect essential narratives of response and responsibility, community and choice, belonging and bodies. They carry vital signals.

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An original graphic novel based on the IVF stories of its husband-and-wife authors and the 1-in-50 couples around the world like them. Conrad and Joanne met in their final year of university and have been virtually inseparable since then. For a while, it felt like they had all the time in the world. Yet now, when they are finally ready to have kids, they find that getting pregnant isn’t always so easy. Ahead of them lies a difficult, expensive, and emotional journey into the world of assisted fertility, where each ‘successful’ implantation is followed by a two-week wait to see if the pregnancy takes. Join Joanne and Conrad, their friends, their family, their coworkers, and a stream of expert medical practitioners as they experience the highs and the lows, the tears and the laughter in this sensitive but unflinching portrayal of the hope and heartbreak offered to so many by modern medicine.

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The definitive account of an icon who shaped gender equality for all women. In this comprehensive, revelatory biography — fifteen years of interviews and research in the making — historian Jane Sherron De Hart explores the central experiences that crucially shaped Ginsburg’s passion for justice, her advocacy for gender equality, and her meticulous jurisprudence. At the heart of her story and abiding beliefs was her Jewish background, specifically the concept of tikkun olam, the Hebrew injunction to ‘repair the world’, with its profound meaning for a young girl who grew up during the Holocaust and World War II. Ruth’s journey began with her mother, who died tragically young but whose intellect inspired her daughter’s feminism. It stretches from Ruth’s days as a baton twirler at Brooklyn’s James Madison High School to Cornell University to Harvard and Columbia Law Schools; to becoming one of the first female law professors in the country and having to fight for equal pay and hide her second pregnancy to avoid losing her job; to becoming the director of the ACLU’s Women’s Rights Project and arguing momentous anti-sex-discrimination cases before the US Supreme Court. All this, even before being nominated in 1993 to become the second woman on the Court, where her crucial decisions and dissents are still making history. Intimately, personably told, this biography offers unprecedented insight into a pioneering life and legal career whose profound impact will reverberate deep into the twenty-first century and beyond.

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A BOOK TO LOOK OUT FOR IN 2022 FOR BBC, i-D MAGAZINE, AND FOYLES An unsparing story of modern-day Britain, told with brilliant flashes of humour and humanity. In a condemned tower block in Glasgow, the final occupant, a young man uplifted by angels and plagued by demons, searches for life in the voids: vacant flats that will never be lived in again. Out in the world, he stumbles into the city, moving from one surreal situation to the next, encountering others on the margins of society, embracing friendship and camaraderie wherever it is offered, grappling with who he is and what shape his future might take.

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The bestselling Australian classic, now available for the first time in the UK. Here is the blue sheep, and here is the red sheep.Here is the bath sheep, and here is the bed sheep.But where is the green sheep? Mem Fox and Judy Horacek take you on a wildly wonderful adventure in their rollicking search for the green sheep.

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When her 29-year-old daughter Paulina goes missing on a sleepy pacific island, Judy Novak suspects the worst. Her fears are soon realised as Paulina’s body is discovered, murdered. Every man on the island is a suspect, yet none are as maligned as Paulina herself, the captivating newcomer known for her hard drinking, disastrous relationships, and a habit for walking alone. But even death won’t stop Judy Novak from fighting for her daughter’s life. A scintillating new thriller, inspired by real events, that puts the victim at the centre, by the author of The Love of a Bad Man

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We are constantly being told that globalisation is good for the economy and good for us, but it’s actually the opposite, argues bestselling author Jeff Rubin in this provocative, timely book. In the pre-coronavirus world, governments and economists bragged that GDP was growing and unemployment was down. But even then, real wages had been stagnant for decades, union membership had collapsed, and full-time employment no longer guaranteed you could pay the bills. When we emerge from the virus, it would be nice to think that living in a country that’s getting richer means that you’re getting richer too, but that’s not the way it works anymore. Falling tariffs, low interest rates, global deregulation, and tax policies that benefit only the rich have all had the same effect: the erosion of the ‘expendable’ middle class. The result, growing global inequality, is a problem of our own making. And solving it won’t be easy if we draw on the same ideas about capital and labour, right and left, that led us to this cliff. Articulating a vision that, remarkably, dovetails with the ideas of both Naomi Klein and Donald Trump, The Expendables is an exhilaratingly fresh perspective that is at once humane and irascible, fearless and rigorous.

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SHORTLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE FOR NON FICTION AND THE RATHBONES FOLIO PRIZE. A GUARDIAN AND OBSERVER BOOK OF THE YEAR. An intimate, deeply reported account of the women who made a shocking decision: to leave their ordinary lives behind and join the Islamic State. These women, some still in school, some with university degrees, many with cosmopolitan dreams of travel and adventure, left their homes and lives in the West to join what they thought would be a movement of justice and piety. Instead, they found themselves trapped in the most brutal terrorist regime of the twenty-first century. Azadeh Moaveni tells their stories with little intervention, providing just enough context for us to see how and why they were pulled into this world.

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An in-depth look at the partnership between Barack Obama and Joe Biden that changed the face of American politics. The ‘bromance’ between Obama and Biden has been much discussed, but this is the first time the full story of their relationship has been told: from their joint victory in 2008 to their disagreements over policy, and from the rift that formed after Obama supported Clinton’s 2015 presidential run to the present day with President Biden in the White House. The Long Alliance examines the past, present, and future of the Obama–Biden legacy — its twists and turns, ruptures and reunions, and how it has shaped and will continue to shape US politics.

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A long-term resident and expert observer of dissent in Hong Kong takes readers to the frontlines of Hong Kong’s revolution. Through the long, hot summer of 2019, Hong Kong burned. Anti-government protests, sparked by a government proposal to introduce a controversial extradition law, grew into a pro-democracy movement that engulfed the city for months. Protesters fought street battles with police, and the unrest brought the People’s Liberation Army to the doorstep of Hong Kong. Driven primarily by youth protesters with their ‘Be water!’ philosophy, borrowed from hometown hero Bruce Lee, this leaderless, technology-driven protest movement defied a global superpower and changed Hong Kong, perhaps forever. In City on Fire, Antony Dapiran provides the first detailed analysis of the protests, and reveals the protesters’ unique tactics. He explains how the movement fits into the city’s long history of dissent, examines the cultural aspects of the movement, and looks at what the protests will mean for the future of Hong Kong, China, and China’s place in the world. City on Fire will be seen as the definitive account of an historic upheaval.

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You only have yourself to blame, you might say, but that’s not true. Some decisions take you down one path, and others another … It’s all about power. Resi is a writer in her mid-forties, married to Sven, a painter. They live, with their four children, in an apartment building in Berlin, where their lease is controlled by some of their closest friends. Those same friends live communally nearby, in a house they co-own and have built together. As the years have passed, Resi has watched her once-dear friends become more and more ensconced in the comforts and compromises of money, success, and the nuclear family. After Resi’s latest book openly criticises stereotypical family life and values, she receives a letter of eviction. Incensed by the true natures and hard realities she now sees so clearly, Resi sets out to describe the world as it really is for her fourteen-year-old daughter, Bea. Written with dark humour and clarifying rage, Anke Stelling’s novel is a ferocious and funny account of motherhood, parenthood, family, and friendship thrust into battle. Lively, rude, and wise, it throws down the gauntlet to those who fail to interrogate who they have become.

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What do people with a particularly long life-span eat? How can you lose weight efficiently? Are illnesses in old age avoidable? Can you ‘eat yourself young’? Discover the answers to these questions and more in this practical, science-based guide to eating well and living longer, which has sold over a million copies worldwide. When science journalist Bas Kast collapsed with chest pains, he feared he had ruined his health forever with a diet of junk food. So he set off on a journey to uncover the essentials of diet and longevity. Here, filtered from thousands of sometimes conflicting research findings, Kast presents the key scientific insights that reveal the most beneficial diet possible. From analysing how much sugar you should consume to looking at the impact of supplements, fasting, and even whether you should drink tea or coffee, Kast breaks down diet myths to present the key facts you need to know in clear, accessible language.

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‘I swim for every chance to get wasted — after every meet, every weekend, every travel trip. This is what I look forward to and what I tell no one: the burn of it down my throat, to my soul curled up in my lungs, the sharpest pain all over it — it seizes and stretches, becoming alive again, and is the only thing that makes sense.’ At fifteen, Casey Legler is already one of the fastest swimmers in the world. She is also an alcoholic, isolated from her family, and incapable of forming lasting connections with those around her. Driven to compete at the highest levels, sent far away from home to train with the best coaches and teams, she finds herself increasingly alone and alienated, living a life of cheap hotels and chlorine-worn skin, anonymous sexual encounters and escalating drug use. Even at what should be a moment of triumph — competing at age nineteen in the 1996 Olympics — she is an outsider looking in, procuring drugs for Olympians she hardly knows, and losing her race after setting a new world record in the qualifying heats. After submitting to years of numbing training in France and the United States, Casey can see no way out of the sinister loneliness that has swelled and festered inside her. Yet wondrously, when it is almost too late, she discovers a small light within herself, and senses a point of calm within the whirlwind of her life. In searing, evocative, visceral prose, Casey gives language to loneliness in this startling story of survival, defiance, and of the embers that still burn when everything else in us goes dark.

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A revealing memoir about living with Asperger’s syndrome that is by turns laugh-out-loud funny and achingly sad. It is only when he is diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, at the age of 55, that Tom Cutler’s life starts to make sense — his accidental rudeness, his strange obsessions (including road signs and Sherlock Holmes), his unusual way of dressing, and his trouble in company. In this moving memoir, Tom explores his eccentric behaviour from boyhood to manhood, examines the role of autism in his family, and investigates the scientific explanations for his condition. Eloquent, witty, and insightful, Keep Clear ultimately shows why the day Tom received his diagnosis turned out to be the happiest day of his life.

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A geneticist tells the stories of men, women, and children whose genes have shaped their lives in unexpected ways. It was while listening to a colleague tell the parents of a newborn girl that their daughter was going to die that a lifelong interest in genetic medicine was sparked in Dr Edwin Kirk. Warmth and gentleness tempered a direct, sure manner — this was the medicine he wanted to practise, where the most advanced science and the most deeply human meet. Twenty-five years later, Dr Kirk works both with patients and in the lab, and he spearheads a campaign that will change the way we think about having babies. His experience is without parallel, but it is his humour and insight that make all the difference. Find out why Dr Kirk found himself among hundreds of people, each with a glass of poison in front of them — and how you might perform the same experiment yourself (without the poison). Learn how the realisation that a young boy wasn’t short ended up saving the life of his mother — and how Angelina Jolie has saved the lives of many more. Sit in the room with Dr Kirk and his patients as they navigate the world of heartbreaking uncertainties, tantalising possibilities, and thorny questions of morality. In genetics, it is the particularities of an individual’s history that matter, and here, in clear and considerate writing, those individual stories are given voice.

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The world consumes over 300 million tonnes of plastic each year. But when did we start using plastic? And why? Where does all the plastic waste go? Journey through the life cycle of plastic — how plastics are produced, the many uses of plastics throughout the last century, how our plastic use has spiralled out of control, and what we can do about it.

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The true story of the little-known mental-health pioneer who revolutionised how we see the defining problem of our era: anxiety. Panic, depression, sorrow, guilt, disgrace, obsession, sleeplessness, low confidence, loneliness, agoraphobia … Dr Claire Weekes knew how to treat them, but was dismissed as underqualified and overly populist by the psychiatric establishment. In a radical move, she had gone directly to the people. Her international bestseller Self Help for Your Nerves, first published in 1962 and still in print, helped tens of millions of people to overcome all of these, and continues to do so. Weekes pioneered an anxiety treatment that is now at the cutting edge of modern psychotherapies. Her early explanation of fear, and its effect on the nervous system, is state of the art. Psychologists use her method, neuroscientists study the interaction between different fear circuits in the brain, and many psychiatrists are revisiting the mind–body connection that was the hallmark of her unique work. Face, accept, float, let time pass: hers was the invisible hand that rewrote the therapeutic manual. This understanding of the biology of fear could not be more contemporary — ‘acceptance’ is the treatment du jour, and all mental-health professionals explain the phenomenon of fear in the same way she did so many years ago. However, most of them are unaware of the debt they have to a woman whose work has found such a huge public audience. This book is the first to tell that story, and to tell Weekes’ own remarkable tale, of how a mistaken diagnosis of tuberculosis led to heart palpitations, beginning her fascinating journey to a practical treatment for anxiety that put power back in the hands of the individual.

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NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF 2022 BY THE NEW YORK TIMES The first book to tell the full story of race and health in America today, showing the toll racism takes on individuals and the health of the nation. In the US, Black people have poorer health outcomes than white people at every stage of their lives: Black babies are more than twice as likely as white babies to die at birth or in the first year of life; Blacks in every age-group under sixty-five have significantly higher death rates than whites. Racial disparities in healthcare are impossible to ignore, and yet they have never been fully investigated until now. In Under the Skin, Linda Villarosa reveals the elements in the American healthcare system and society that cause Black people to ‘live sicker and die quicker’. Today’s medical texts and instruments still carry slavery-era assumptions that Black bodies are fundamentally different from white bodies. Study after study of medical settings show worse treatment and outcomes for Black patients. Black people live in dirtier, more polluted communities due to environmental racism. And, most powerfully, Villarosa describes how coping with the daily scourge of racism ages Black people prematurely, a phenomenon called weathering. Anchored by human stories and offering incontrovertible proof, Under the Skin is dramatic, tragic, and necessary reading. ‘A searing indictment of a broken health system in the age of American decline.’ New Statesman ‘Villarosa’s empathic and sharp-sighted journalism is as astute as it is groundbreaking, as brilliant as it is timely. Let the conversations begin!’ Jacqueline Woodson, New York Times bestselling author of Red at the Bone

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Intellectual. Feminist. Polemicist. Provocateur. This riveting biography of Germaine Greer traces the personal and political history of one of the most important, radical, and controversial women of twentieth and twenty-first century feminism. It reveals how her public persona has shifted with time from sixties trailblazer to present-day rabble-rouser, and why she endures as a subject of fascination. This is the first biography of Greer for two decades, drawing on unprecedented access to her extensive personal archive, opened at Melbourne University in 2016. Kleinhenz has interrogated Greer's personal and professional files, spoken to people who have known her from her school days onwards, and read every word written by and about her. Beginning with Greer’s troubled early life in 1940s Melbourne, it traces her career, relationships with men and women, her travels, and her home life, and examines Greer’s work and ideas from The Female Eunuch to the #MeToo movement. The result is a rich, detailed portrait of a woman rightly both legendary and notorious — revealed here in all her glories, weaknesses, and contradictions.

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WINNER OF THE ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE IN NONFICTION WINNER OF THE NIB LITERARY AWARD FINALIST FOR THE KIRKUS PRIZE FOR NONFICTION HIGHLY COMMENDED IN THE WAINWRIGHT PRIZE FOR WRITING ON GLOBAL CONSERVATION A SUNDAY INDEPENDENT BOOK OF THE YEAR ‘There is a kind of hauntedness in wild animals today: a spectre related to environmental change … Our fear is that the unseen spirits that move in them are ours. Once more, animals are a moral force.’ When Rebecca Giggs encountered a humpback whale stranded on her local beach in Australia, she began to wonder how the lives of whales might shed light on the condition of our seas. How do whales experience environmental change? Has our connection to these fabled animals been transformed by technology? What future awaits us, and them? And what does it mean to write about nature in the midst of an ecological crisis? In Fathoms: the world in the whale, Giggs blends natural history, philosophy, and science to explore these questions with clarity and hope. In lively, inventive prose, she introduces us to whales so rare they have never been named; she tells us of the astonishing variety found in whale sounds, and of whale ‘pop’ songs that sweep across hemispheres. She takes us into the deeps to discover that one whale’s death can spark a great flourishing of creatures. We travel to Japan to board whaling ships, examine the uncanny charisma of these magnificent mammals, and confront the plastic pollution now pervading their underwater environment. In the spirit of Rachel Carson and John Berger, Fathoms is a work of profound insight and wonder. It marks the arrival of an essential new voice in narrative nonfiction and provides us with a powerful, surprising, and compelling view of some of the most urgent issues of our time.

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From Russia’s tampering with the US election to the WannaCry hack that temporarily crippled the NHS, cyber has become the weapon of choice for democracies, dictators, and terrorists. Cheap to acquire, easily deniable, and used for a variety of malicious purposes — from crippling infrastructure to sowing discord and doubt — cyberweapons are re-writing the rules of warfare. In less than a decade, they have displaced terrorism and nuclear missiles as the biggest immediate threat to international security and to democracy. Here, New York Times correspondent David E. Sanger takes us from the White House Situation Room to the dens of Chinese government hackers and the boardrooms of Silicon Valley, piecing together a remarkable picture of a world now coming face-to-face with the most sophisticated — and arguably most dangerous — weapon ever invented. The Perfect Weapon is the dramatic story of a new era of constant sabotage, misinformation, and fear, in which everyone is a target.

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A radical vision for a better future: an economy that works for us, rather than the other way around. As this major German bestseller reports, our world is at a tipping point, and we feel it every day. Costs are rising, the gap between the rich and poor is increasing, natural resources are depleted, and the effects of climate change are starting to take hold. We are under increasing social and environmental stress. But, as leading economist Maja Göpel argues here, there is another path forward. She invites us to imagine what we want our future to look like, and offers solutions that will help us to get there. It’s time to question our principles, set new goals, and re-evaluate our priorities. Time to rethink our world and find new ways of living that don’t drain our planet any further. We need a fair distribution of wealth, and a way to reconcile the social with the ecological. We need to work smarter, not harder. Critical, yet full of encouragement, Maja Göpel chooses surprising and enlightening examples to illustrate how we can leave behind our familiar ways of living to achieve a better future.

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A Daily Telegraph book of the year. This is a landmark in science writing that resurrects from the vaults of neglect the polymath Jerome Cardano, a Milanese of the sixteenth century. Who is he? A gambler and blasphemer, inventor and chancer, plagued by demons and anxieties, astrologer to kings, emperors, and popes, and the unacknowledged discoverer of the mathematical foundations of quantum physics. The Quantum Astrologer's Handbook, like Jerome, has multiple occupations: it is at once a biography, a history of science, an explanation of quantum theory, and an engrossing story which reads like the best kind of novel. It is a science book like no other about a scientist like no other.

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Ever since Darwin, science has enshrined competition as biology’s brutal architect. But this revelatory new book argues that our narrow view of evolution has caused us to ignore the generosity and cooperation that exist around us, from the soil to the sky. In Sweet in Tooth and Claw, Kristin Ohlson explores the subtle ways in which nature is in constant collaboration to the betterment of all species. From the bear that discards the remainders of his salmon dinner on the forest ground, to the bright coral reefs of Cuba, she shows readers not only the connectivity lying beneath the surface in natural ecosystems, but why it’s vital for humans to incorporate that understanding into our interactions with nature, and also with each other. Much of the damage that humans have done to our natural environment stems from our ignorance of these dense webs of connection. As we struggle to cope with the environmental hazards that our behaviour has unleashed, it’s more important than ever to understand nature’s billions of cooperative interactions. This way, we can stop disrupting them and instead rely on them to renew ecosystems. In reporting from the frontlines of scientific research, regenerative agriculture, and urban conservation, Ohlson shows that a shift from focusing on competition to collaboration can heal not only our relationships with the natural world, but also with each other.

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Sometimes we find what we’re looking for in the most unexpected places. Wren just wants a bit of peace and quiet. What he gets is the noisiest baby sister you could ever imagine! But when Wren runs away to the country, he discovers that maybe peace and quiet isn’t all he needs … With bright, modern illustrations and a powerfully simple story, any child (and any parent!) who’s ever had to deal with a noisy sibling will love Wren. This debut from the new team of Katrina Lehman and Sophie Beer is sure to delight.

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A timely examination of progressive politics in the era of radical populism. Since 2016, western democracies have experienced a series of political earthquakes, spectacularly upending conventional political wisdom. Everywhere, outsider politicians rail against ‘the elite’. Yet, with a few notable exceptions, the populist mood has benefited reactionaries rather than reformers. The status quo might be in crisis, but the emerging voices are those of hate and violence. Where is the progressive alternative? In Trigger Warnings, Jeff Sparrow sympathetically but critically examines key progressive ideas. How does a billionaire position himself as anti-elitist? Are the culture wars worth fighting? What's at stake in the battles over political correctness? Should progressives defend it — and, if so, how? Sparrow traces the evolution of the Left and Right to explain the origins of this strange evolution, untangling some of the thorniest controversies of our time and arguing that the future needn't only belong to nihilists and bigots.

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Spring and summer are my mother’s time, autumn and winter are my husband’s. What is left for me? Persephone spends six months of the year under the ground with her husband, king of the dead, and six months on earth with her mother, goddess of the harvest. It has been this way for nine thousand years, since the deal was struck. But when she resurfaces this spring, something is different. Rains lash the land, crops grow out of season or not at all, there are people trying to build a road through the woods, and her mother does not seem able to stop them. The natural world is changing rapidly and even the gods have lost control. While Demeter tries to regain her powers and fend off her daughter’s husband, who wants to drag his queen back underground for good, Persephone finally gets a taste of freedom, joining a group of protestors. Used to blinking up at the world from below, as she looks down on the earth for the very first time from the treetops with activist Snow, Persephone realises that there are choices she can make for herself. But what will these choices mean for her mother, her husband, and for the new shoots of life inside her? No Season but the Summer takes a classic myth and turns it on its head, asking what will happen when our oldest stories fail us, when all the rules have changed. It is, above all, a book about choice.

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New York Times bestselling author Charles Graeber tells the astonishing story of the group of scientists working on a code that can enable the human immune system to fight — and perhaps even cure — cancer. For decades, scientists have puzzled over one of medicine’s greatest mysteries: why doesn’t our immune system fight cancer the way it does other diseases? The answer is a series of tricks that cancer has developed to turn off normal immune responses — tricks that scientists have only recently discovered, and now are learning to defeat. We are in the midst of a revolution in our understanding of cancer and how to beat it. Groundbreaking, riveting, and expertly told, The Breakthrough is the story of the game-changing and Nobel Prize-winning scientific discoveries that unleash our natural ability to recognise and defeat cancer, as told through the experiences of the patients, physicians, and immunotherapy researchers who are on the front lines. This is the incredible true story of the race to find a cure, and the definitive account of a historic moment in medical science.

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The bestselling memoir by France's president, Emmanuel Macron. Some believe that our country is in decline, that the worst is yet to come, that our civilisation is withering away. That only isolation or civil strife are on our horizon. That to protect ourselves from the great transformations taking place around the globe, we should go back in time and apply the recipes of the last century. Others imagine that France can continue on a slow downward slide. That the game of political juggling — first the Left, then the Right — will allow us breathing space. The same faces and the same people who have been around for so long. I am convinced that they are all wrong. It is their models, their recipes, that have simply failed. France as a whole has not failed. In Revolution, Emmanuel Macron, the youngest president in the history of France, reveals his personal history and his inspirations, and discusses his vision of France and its future in a new world that is undergoing a ‘great transformation’ that has not been experienced since the invention of the printing press and the Renaissance. This is a remarkable book that seeks to lay the foundations for a new society — a compelling testimony and statement of values by an important political leader who has become the flag-bearer for a new kind of politics.

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On an ordinary day, in an even more ordinary town, it was Albert’s birthday. When Grandma Z roars into town on her motorcycle, Albert is swept up in a very extraordinary adventure. Life may never be the same again! This glorious debut from Daniel Gray-Barnett is filled with wonder, imagination, and a wild, magical spirit that will thrill young and old.

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From the cult author of Wolf in White Van comes a horror- infused thriller set in a tiny Midwestern town; Clerks meets Cormac McCarthy. Jeremy works at the counter of Video Hut in Nevada, Iowa. It’s the 1990s, pre-DVD, and the work is predictable and familiar; he likes his boss, and it gets him out of the house. But when a local schoolteacher comes in to return her copy of Targets, she has an odd complaint: ‘There’s something on it,’ she says. Two days later, another customer brings back She’s All That and complains that something is wrong: ‘There’s another movie on this tape.’ Curious, Jeremy takes a look. And what he sees on the videos is so strange and disturbing that it propels him out of his comfortable routine and into a search for the tapes’ creator. As the once-peaceful fields and barns of the Iowa landscape begin to seem sinister and threatening, Jeremy must come to terms with a truth that is as devastatingly sad as it is shocking.

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In a society obsessed with living longer and looking younger, what does middle age mean today? Spurred by her own brutal propulsion into menopause, Marina Benjamin’s clear-eyed account of our middle years takes inspiration from literature and philosophy to weigh the challenges and opportunities of mid-life. It offers an inspired and expanded vision of how to be middle-aged happily and harmoniously, without sentiment or delusion.

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A GUARDIAN, NEW STATESMAN, SPECTATOR, AND IRISH TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR A new, feminist translation of Beowulf by the author of the acclaimed novel The Mere Wife. Nearly twenty years after Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf — and fifty years after the translation that continues to torment students around the world — there is a radical new verse interpretation of the epic poem by Maria Dahvana Headley, which brings to light elements never before translated into English. A man seeks to prove himself as a hero. A monster seeks silence in his territory. A warrior seeks to avenge her murdered son. A dragon ends it all. These familiar components of the epic poem are seen with a novelist’s eye towards gender, genre, and history. Beowulf has always been a tale of entitlement and encroachment — of powerful men seeking to become more powerful and one woman seeking justice for her child — but this version brings new context to an old story. While crafting her contemporary adaptation, Headley unearthed significant shifts lost over centuries of translation.

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Quadratic equations, Pythagoras’ theorem, imaginary numbers, and pi — you may remember studying these at school, but did anyone ever explain why? Never fear — bestselling science writer, and your new favourite maths teacher, Michael Brooks, is here to help. In The Maths That Made Us, Brooks reminds us of the wonders of numbers: how they enabled explorers to travel far across the seas and astronomers to map the heavens; how they won wars and halted the HIV epidemic; how they are responsible for the design of your home and almost everything in it, down to the smartphone in your pocket. His clear explanations of the maths that built our world, along with stories about where it came from and how it shaped human history, will engage and delight. From ancient Egyptian priests to the Apollo astronauts, and Babylonian tax collectors to juggling robots, join Brooks and his extraordinarily eccentric cast of characters in discovering how maths made us who we are today.

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Old and young. White and brown. Male and female. British. Indian. Other. Four strangers from around the world arrive in India for a wedding. Together, they climb a mountain â but will they see the same thing from the top?Londoner Reema, who left India before she could speak, is searching for a sign that will help her make a life-changing decision. In pensioner Jacksonâs suitcase is something he must let go of, but is he strong enough?Together with two unlikely companions, they take a road trip up a mountain deep in the Himalayas, heading for the snow line â the place where the ice begins. But even standing in the same place, surrounded by magnificent views, they see things differently. As they ascend higher and higher, they must learn to cross the lines that divide them.

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Next, I brushed my hare and put on my new pear of shoes. Mum painted her nails before we set out for the day. Join Banjo and his mum on what starts as a straightforward day out, only to have it upended by homophones (two words with the same pronunciation but with different meanings), turning the narrative into the delightfully absurd. Kids and adults alike will love this joyful new wordplay extravaganza from debut author Mel Amon with illustrations by international superstar Sophie Beer. The hilarious wordplay combined with delightful illustrations have kids ‘in on the joke’ from the very beginning.

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A FINANCIAL TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR A call to action for the creative class and labour movement to rally against the power of Big Tech and Big Media. Corporate concentration has breached the stratosphere, as have corporate profits. An ever-expanding constellation of industries are now monopolies (where sellers have excessive power over buyers) or monopsonies (where buyers hold the whip hand over sellers) — or both. Scholar Rebecca Giblin and writer and activist Cory Doctorow argue we’re in a new era of ‘chokepoint capitalism’, with exploitative businesses creating insurmountable barriers to competition that enable them to capture value that should rightfully go to others. All workers are weakened by this, but the problem is especially well illustrated by the plight of creative workers. From Amazon’s use of digital rights management and bundling to radically change the economics of book publishing, to Google and Facebook’s siphoning away of ad revenues from news media, and the Big Three record labels’ use of inordinately long contracts to up their own margins at the cost of artists, chokepoints are everywhere. By analysing book publishing and news, live music and music streaming, screenwriting, radio, and more, Giblin and Doctorow deftly show how powerful corporations construct ‘anti-competitive flywheels’ designed to lock in users and suppliers, make their markets hostile to new entrants, and then force workers and suppliers to accept unfairly low prices. Chokepoint Capitalism is a call to workers of all sectors to unite to help smash these chokepoints and take back the power and profit that’s being heisted away — before it’s too late.

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From the International Booker Prizewinning translator and Women's Prize finalist, a propulsive, beguiling novel about eight translators and their search for a world-renowned author who goes missing. Eight translators arrive at a house in a forest on the border of Belarus. It belongs to the writer Irena Rey, and they are there to translate her magnum opus, Grey Eminence. But within days of their arrival, Irena disappears without a trace. The translators, who hail from eight different countries but share the same reverence for their beloved author, begin to investigate where she may have gone while proceeding with work on her masterpiece. They explore this ancient, wooded refuge with its intoxicating slime moulds and lichens and study her exotic belongings and layered texts for clues. But doing so reveals secrets and deceptions of Irena Rey's that they are utterly unprepared for. Forced to face their differences as they grow increasingly paranoid in this fever dream of isolation and

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In this gripping debut, a young Cree woman’s dreams lead her on a perilous journey of self-discovery that ultimately forces her to confront the toll of a legacy of violence on her family, her community, and the land they call home. When Mackenzie wakes up with a severed crow’s head in her hands, she panics. Only moments earlier she had been fending off masses of birds in a snow-covered forest. In bed, when she blinks, the head disappears. Night after night, Mackenzie’s dreams return her to a memory from before her sister Sabrina’s untimely death: a weekend at the family’s lakefront campsite, long obscured by a fog of guilt. But when the waking world starts closing in, too — crows stalk her every move around the city; she gets threatening text messages from someone claiming to be Sabrina — Mackenzie knows this is more than she can handle alone. Travelling north to her rural hometown in Alberta, she finds her family still steeped in the same grief that she ran away to Vancouver to escape. They welcome her back, but their shaky reunion only seems to intensify her dreams — and make them more dangerous. What really happened that night at the lake, and what did it have to do with Sabrina’s death? Only a bad Cree would put their family at risk, but what if whatever has been calling Mackenzie home was already inside her?

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What is it like to radically change your life? Writer Alec Ash meets the Chinese who are doing just this, ‘reverse migrating’ from the cities to the remote countryside of southwest China — and joins them himself, in an extraordinary and inspiring journey of self-discovery. In 2020, Alec Ash left behind his old life as a journalist in buzzy Beijing, and moved to Dali, a rural valley in China’s Yunnan province, centred around a great lake shaped like an ear and overlooked by the Cang mountain range. Here, he hoped to find the space and perspective to mend heartbreak, and escape the trappings of fast-paced, high-pressured city life. Originally home to the Bai people, Dali has become a richly diverse community of people of all ages and backgrounds, with one shared goal: to reject the worst parts of modernity and live more simply, in tune with the natural world and away from the nexus of authoritarian power. It is into this community that Alec embeds himself, charting his first year of life in Dali among these fascinating neighbours, from political dissidents to bohemian hippies. The Mountains Are High is a beautifully written, candid memoir about how reevaluating what is really important and taking a leap of faith to reach it can genuinely transform your life. As one of the ‘new migrants’ tells Alec when he arrives: it is easy to change your environment, far more difficult to change your mind.

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A jaw-dropping re-evaluation of everything we thought we knew about men, women, and sex. Men are biologically programmed to want sex with lots of different women, whereas women are designed to stay true to one person, right? Wrong. In Untrue, New York Times -bestselling author Wednesday Martin reveals that we are just at the beginning of understanding women’s sexuality properly. From New York to Namibia to a conference of sex researchers in Montreal, she takes us on a journey to understand women who refuse monogamy, posing questions about why we became sexually exclusive in the first place. Martin attends all-female sex parties where married straight women fulfill their fantasies; considers contemporary societies where women take many lovers; analyses how the invention of the plough suppressed female autonomy; and presents fascinating research about why women stray (their motivations are not so different from men’s). Frank and myth busting, Untrue validates the desires of women everywhere, including the ‘silent majority’ in committed relationships who struggle with staying faithful.

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A Sunday Times bestseller — now with revised and expanded content on the exciting new science about the gut-brain link. Our gut is as important as our brain or heart, yet we know very little about how it works and many of us are too embarrassed to ask questions. In Gut, Giulia Enders breaks this taboo, revealing the latest science on how much our digestive system has to offer. From our miraculous gut bacteria — which can play a part in obesity, allergies, depression and even Alzheimer’s — to the best position to poo, this entertaining and informative health handbook shows that we can all benefit from getting to know the wondrous world of our inner workings.

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