A. J. Liebling, born in Manhattan in 1904, joined the staff of the New Yorker in 1935 and contributed innumerable articles to the magazine throughout his lifetime, on subjects ranging from food to boxing and France to horse racing. As a war correspondent during the Second World War, he reported from France, England and Algeria, and participated in the Normandy landings. In later life he married the writer Jean Stafford, his third wife. He died in 1963.

A. J. Liebling

A. J. Rosen is an author of YA fantasy and is known as @agatharoza on Wattpad.

A. J. Rosen

A. K. Davidson

A. O. Scott has been a film critic at the New York Times since 2000. His writing has appeared in many other publications, including the New York Review of Books, Slate, the New Yorker and the Nation. A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism in 2010, Scott is currently Distinguished Professor of Film Criticism at Wesleyan University. He lives with his family in Brooklyn, New York. 
 
@aoscott

A. O. Scott

A.S. Byatt (1936-2023) was a novelist, short-story writer and critic of international renown. Her novels include Possession (winner of the Booker Prize 1990), the Frederica Quartet and The Children’s Book, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction. She was appointed CBE in 1990 and DBE in 1999, and was awarded the Erasmus Prize 2016 for her ‘inspiring contribution to life writing’ and the Pak Kyongni Prize 2017. In 2018 she received the Hans Christian Andersen Literature Award.

A. S. Byatt

A. T. Williams won the George Orwell Prize for Political Writing in 2013 for his book A Very British Killing: The Death of Baha Mousa. He lives in Warwickshire.

A. T. Williams

A. W. Chase

Dubbed ‘The new queen of spy fiction’ by the Guardian newspaper, and ‘the real thing’ by the Washington Post, A.C. 'Ava' Glass is the CWA Dagger-shortlisted author of Alias Emma (The Chase), The Traitor and The Trap. The Traitor was a 2023 Richard and Judy Bookclub pick. Alias Emma was a Barnes and Noble book of the month. A former crime reporter and communications consultant, for five years Ava worked closely with spies. Her time in that world fascinated her, and the people she met back then inspire every book she writes.

A.C. Glass

A.E. Housman

Arthur Edward Waite was the designer and co-creator of the now famous Rider Waite Tarot deck. 
 
An American-born British poet and scholarly mystic, his strong interest in all esoteric matters - divination, magic, Kabbalism, alchemy and Freemasony - led to him penning a number of books. These include the Key to the Tarot, The Book of Ceremonial Magic and A New Encyclopedia of Freemasony.

A.E. Waite

A.E. Warren is the author of the Tomorrow's Ancestors series, which consists of Subject Twenty-One, The Hidden Base, The Fourth Species and The Final Rising. 
 
After spending eight years working as a lawyer, she began to write in the evenings and early mornings as a form of escapism from life in a very small cubicle with lots of files. She self-published her first novels in her spare time, which were picked up by Del Rey UK which is the science fiction/fantasy imprint of Penguin Random House. 
 
 She is an avid reader, occasional gamer and fair-weather runner. She lives in the UK with her husband, daughter and hopefully, one day, a wise border terrier named Austen.

A.E. Warren

A.G.D. Maran

A.J. Ayer

A K Benedict writes crime and speculative fiction in a room filled with clowns, mannequins and Doctor Who figures. Her first novel, The Beauty of Murder, was nominated for an eDunnit award and is in development for a major 8-part TV series by Company Pictures. Her second, Jonathan Dark or The Evidence of Ghosts, came out in February 2016. She's written Torchwood audio dramas for Big Finish and her short stories have featured in anthologies including Great British Horror and Best British Short Stories. She lives in St Leonards-on-Sea with her dog, Dame Margaret Rutherford.

A.K.Benedict

A. L. Kennedy has twice been selected as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists and has won a host of other awards – including the Costa Book of the Year for her novel Day. She lives in Essex.

A.L. Kennedy

A.M. Ellis is a speculative fiction author and lover of everything steeped in myth and mystery. Her stories often lean into diverse voices, not only in her identity as a Black woman, but in exploring neurodivergence and mental health. A proud introvert and nostalgic gamer, she lives in Maryland, USA, with her husband and three children. Angelica is also the author of Hunt A Killer, a PERFECT SCORE novel, under the pen name A.M. Ellis, which she wrote as an IP for Scholastic in the US.

A.M. Ellis

A.N. Wilson was born in 1950 and educated at Rugby and New College, Oxford. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he holds a prominent position in the world of literature and journalism. He is an award-winning biographer and a celebrated novelist, winning prizes for much of his work. He lives in North London.

A.N. Wilson

A.T. Emerald

A.W. Priest

A.B.C. Merriman-Labor was a barrister, writer and munitions worker born in Freetown, Sierra Leone in 1877. His published works include A Series of Lectures on the Negro Race and The Story of the African Slave in a Nutshell. He also edited two editions of the Handbook of Sierra Leone. He arrived in the UK in 1904 to study law. In 1907, he organised a centenary commemoration of the abolition of the slave trade in Westminster Abbey. He later embarked on an 'entertainment-lecture' tour called Life and Scenes in Britain, travelling across thousands of miles of West, South West and Central Africa, which he expanded on to create Britons Through Negro Spectacles.

ABC Merriman-Labor

AJ Cronin

AJ Molloy

Aabria Iyengar is an American actress and author.

Aabria Iyengar

Aaliya Jaleel is a freelance illustrator, designer, and visual development artist, currently majoring in Animation at the University of Texas at Dallas. She is also the illustrator of Under My Hijab and Muslim Girls Rise. You can visit her online at www.aaliyamj.com.

Aaliya Jaleel

Aaron Allston

After more than fifteen years of experience as a clinical psychotherapist, Dr Aaron Balick has taken the amazing insights from psychology and psychotherapy out of the consultation room and made them accessible to the wider world. 
 
He has been an ‘agony uncle’ for many years for both CBBC and BBC Radio 1, as well as on television, including BBC Worldwide, BBC 3 and BBC Learning.

Aaron Balick

Aaron Carroll

Aaron Dignan is the founder of The Ready--a global organizational transformation and coaching practice--that helps companies large and small adopt new forms of self-organization and dynamic teaming. Clients include Johnson &amp; Johnson, Microsoft, Lloyds Bank, Citibank, Boeing, Mailchimp, Airbnb, Dropbox, and charity: water. 
 
He is also the founder of Murmur--a SaaS startup that helps teams scale culture through the magic of working agreements. The Murmur platform will allow every team on the planet to define and share their ways of working. 
 
Dignan is the author of Brave New Work (2019) and Game Frame (2011), co-host of the Brave New Work podcast, and a friend to misfit toys.

Aaron Dignan

Aaron Edwards is a senior lecturer in defence and international affairs at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, specialising in terrorism and counter-insurgency. He is the author and editor of several books, including Defending the Realm: The Politics of Britain’s Small Wars Since 1945, and has lectured all over the world on aspects of national and international security. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

Aaron Edwards

Aaron Robertson is a writer, an editor, and a translator of Italian literature. His translation of Igiaba Scego’s Beyond Babylon was short-listed for the 2020 PEN Translation Prize and the National Translation Award, and in 2021 he received a National Endowment for the Arts grant. His work has appeared in the New York Times, The Nation, Foreign Policy, n+1, The Point, and Literary Hub, among other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Aaron Robertson

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Theresa MacPhail

Hay fever. Peanut allergies. Eczema. Billions of people worldwide have some form of allergy; millions have one severe enough to seriously endanger their health. And over the past decade, the number of people diagnosed with allergy has been steadily increasing, an ever-growing medical burden on individuals, families, and our health care system. 
 
Medical anthropologist Theresa MacPhail, herself an allergy sufferer whose father died of a bee sting, set out to understand why. The result is a holistic and deeply researched examination of allergies, from their first medical description in 1819 to the mind-bending new treatments that are giving patients hope. MacPhail spent years interviewing hundreds of experts, patients and activists, in an effort to understand how recent changes in our environment and lifestyle are contributing to the dramatic rise in cases globally. Pollution, chemicals, antibiotics and, increasingly, climate change are all making our immune systems become more and more irritated. But, as she shows us in Allergic, understanding what is irritating us and why will help us to craft better environments in the future-so we can all breathe easier.

Allergic

How Our Immune System Reacts to a Changing World

Helen Czerski

WINNER OF THE 2024 WAINWRIGHT PRIZE FOR CONSERVATION 
 
FINANCIAL TIMES 2023 HIGHLIGHT 
 
'Helen Czerski weaves together physics and biology, history and science, in a beautifully poetic way.' 
Professor Alice Roberts 
 
'In Helen Czerski's hands, the mechanical becomes magical. An instant classic.' 
Tristan Gooley, author of How to Read Water 
 
'Blue Machine is quite simply one of the best books I have ever read.' 
Dr George McGavin, zoologist, entomologist and broadcaster 
 
'A fascinating dive into the essential engine that drives our world. Czerski brings the oceans alive with compelling stories that masterfully navigate this most complex system.' 
Gaia Vince, science journalist, broadcaster and author of Nomad Century 
 
 
All of the Earth's ocean, from the equator to the poles, is a single engine powered by sunlight - a blue machine. 
 
Earth is home to a huge story that is rarely told - that of our ocean. Not the fish or the dolphins, but the massive ocean engine itself: what it does, why it works, and the many ways it has influenced animals, weather and human history & culture. 
 
In a book that will recalibrate our view of this defining feature of our planet, physicist Helen Czerski dives deep to illuminate the murky depths of the ocean engine, examining the messengers, passengers and voyagers that live in it, travel over it, and survive because of it. From the ancient Polynesians who navigated the Pacific by reading the waves to permanent residents of the deep such as the Greenland shark that can live for hundreds of years, she explains the vast currents, invisible ocean walls and underwater waterfalls that all have their place in the ocean's complex, interlinked system. 
 
Timely, elegant and passionately argued, Blue Machine presents a fresh perspective on what it means to be a citizen of an ocean planet. The understanding it offers is crucial to our future. Drawing on years of experience at the forefront of marine science, Helen Czerski captures the magnitude and subtlety of Earth's defining feature, showing us the thrilling extent to which we are at the mercy of this great engine.

Blue Machine

How the Ocean Shapes Our World

Ludovic Slimak

What if we have completely misunderstood who the Neanderthals truly were? 
 
For over a century we saw them as inferior to Homo Sapiens. Today, Neanderthals are seen as fully human, different from us only because of their distant cultural traditions. 
 
Neanderthal hunter and paleoanthropologist Ludovic Slimak understands these enigmatic creatures like no one else after studying them for three decades. Taking us on a fascinating archaeological investigation from the Arctic Circle to the deep Mediterranean forests, he traces their steps, deciphering their stories through every single detail they left behind. 
 
In this stunning, bold book, he argues that Neanderthals should be understood on their own terms. They had their own history, their own rituals, their own customs. Their own intelligence. A remarkable intelligence, for sure, but an intelligence that may have been very different from ours. 
 
A thought-provoking detective story, written with wit and verve, The Naked Neanderthal shifts our understanding of deep history - and in the process reveals just how much we have yet to learn.

The Naked Neanderthal

Jonathan Kennedy

This humbling and revelatory book shows how infectious disease has shaped humanity at every stage, from the first success of Homo sapiens over the equally intelligent Neanderthals to the fall of Rome and the rise of Islam. How did the Black Death lead to the birth of capitalism? And how did the Industrial Revolution lead to the birth of the welfare state? 
 
Infectious diseases are not just something that happens to us, but a part of who we are. The only reason humans don't lay eggs is that a virus long ago inserted itself into our DNA. In fact, 8% of the human genome was put there by viruses. We have been thinking about the survival of the fittest all wrong: human evolution is not simply about our strength and intelligence, but about what viruses can and can't use for their benefit. 
 
By confronting our ongoing battle with infectious diseases globally, Dr Jonathan Kennedy shows how germs have been responsible for some of the seismic revolutions in human history, and how the crises they precipitate offer vital opportunities to change course.

Pathogenesis

How germs made history

Vaclav Smil

The New York Times bestselling author returns with a mind-opening exploration of how size defines life on Earth. 
 
Explaining the key processes shaping size in nature, society and technology, Smil busts myths around proportions - from bodies to paintings and the so-called golden ratio - tells us what Jonathan Swift got wrong in Gulliver's Travels - the giant Brobdingnagian's legs would buckle under their enormous weight - and dives headfirst into the most contentious issue in ergonomics: the size of aeroplane seats. 
 
It is no exaggeration to say this fascinating and wide-ranging tour de force will change the way you look at absolutely everything.

Size

How It Explains the World

Alison Bashford

In his early twenties, poor, depressed, stranded in the Coral Sea on the HMS Rattlesnake, hopelessly in love with the young Englishwoman Henrietta Heathorn, Thomas Henry Huxley was a nobody. And yet together he and Henrietta would return to London and go on to found one of the great intellectual and scientific dynasties of their age. 
 
The Huxley family through four generations profoundly shaped how we all see ourselves, as individuals and as a species. They worked as scientists, novelists, mystics, film-makers, poets and above all, as public lecturers, educators and explainers. 
 
Their speciality was evolution in all its forms. But perhaps their greatest subject was themselves. Alison Bashford's engaging and original book interweaves the Huxleys' momentous public achievements with their private triumphs and tragedies. The result is the history of a family, but also a history of humanity grappling with its place in nature. This book shows how much we owe - for better or worse - to the unceasing curiosity, self-absorption and enthusiasms of a small, strange group of men and women.

An Intimate History of Evolution

The Story of the Huxley Family

Clare Chambers

In this thought-provoking, original work, acclaimed political philosopher Clare Chambers argues that the unmodified body is a key political principle. While defending individuals' right to change their bodies, she argues that the social pressures to modify undermine equality. She shows how the connected ideas of the natural body, the normal body, and the whole body have been used both to disrupt and to maintain social hierarchies - sometimes oppressing, other times liberating. The body becomes a site of political importance: a place where hierarchies of sex, gender, race, disability, age, and class are reinforced. 
 
Through a clear-sighted analysis of the power dynamics that structure our society, and with examples ranging widely from bodybuilding to breast implants, deafness to male circumcision, biology to gender identity, Intact stresses that we must break away from the oppressive forces that demand we alter our bodies. Instead, it offers a bold, transformative vision of the human body that is equal without expectation.

Intact

A Defence of the Unmodified Body

David Christian

Every second of our lives - whether we're looking both ways before crossing the street, celebrating the birth of a baby, or moving to a new city - we must cope with an unknowable future. How do we do this? And how do we, like most living organisms, manage this impossible challenge quite well... at least most of the time? 
 
David Christian, historian and bestselling author of Origin Story, is renowned for pioneering the emerging discipline of Big History, which surveys the whole of the past. But with Future Stories, he casts his sharp analytical eye forward, offering an introduction to the strange world of the future, and a guide to what we think we know about it at all scales, from the predictive mechanisms of single-celled organisms and tomato plants to the merging of colossal galaxies billions of years from now. 
 
Drawing together science and history, philosophy and theology from a huge range of places and times, Christian explores how we prepare for uncertain futures, including the future of human evolution, artificial intelligence, interstellar travel, and more. By linking the study of the past much more closely to the study of the future, we can begin to imagine what the world will look like in the next hundred years and consider solutions to the biggest challenges facing us all.

Future Stories

A user's guide to the future

George Monbiot

For the first time since the Neolithic, we have the opportunity to transform not only our food system but our entire relationship to the living world. 
 
Farming is the world's greatest cause of environmental destruction - and the one we are least prepared to talk about. We criticise urban sprawl, but farming sprawls across thirty times as much land. We have ploughed, fenced and grazed great tracts of the planet, felling forests, killing wildlife, and poisoning rivers and oceans to feed ourselves. Yet millions still go hungry. 
 
Now the food system itself is beginning to falter. But, as George Monbiot shows us in this brilliant, bracingly original new book, we can resolve the biggest of our dilemmas and feed the world without devouring the planet. 
 
Regenesis is a breathtaking vision of a new future for food and for humanity. Drawing on astonishing advances in soil ecology, Monbiot reveals how our changing understanding of the world beneath our feet could allow us to grow more food with less farming. He meets the people who are unlocking these methods, from the fruit and vegetable grower revolutionising our understanding of fertility; through breeders of perennial grains, liberating the land from ploughs and poisons; to the scientists pioneering new ways to grow protein and fat. Together, they show how the tiniest life forms could help us make peace with the planet, restore its living systems, and replace the age of extinction with an age of regenesis.

Regenesis

Feeding the World without Devouring the Planet

Morten H. Christiansen

Nick Chater

'Marvellously clear... playfully persuasive' Richard Dawkins 
'Full of Fascinating details. A delight to read.' Tim Harford 
'Highly original and convincing ... a delight to read!' - Daniel Everett 
 
What is language? 
Why do we have it? 
Why does that matter? 
 
Language is perhaps humanity's most astonishing accomplishment and one that remains poorly understood. 
 
Upending centuries of scholarship (including, most recently, Chomsky and Pinker) The Language Game shows how people learn to talk not by acquiring fixed meanings and rules, but by picking up, reusing, and recombining countless linguistic fragments in novel ways. 
 
Drawing on entertaining and persuasive examples from across the world the book explains: 
 
· How our short-lived memory copes with the on-rushing deluge of sound that is everyday speech. 
· Why it is that language is such a challenge for language scientists but learnt effortlessly by toddlers. 
· Why the languages of the world are so spectacularly varied---and why no two people speak quite the same language. 
· Why humans have language, but chimps don't. 
· How language gave us a big brain and changed the course of evolution. 
· How language doesn't limit, but does shape, how we think. 
·And ultimately, why all we know about language should give us hope. 
 
Christiansen and Chater's The Language Game draws on a fascinating range of examples to show the way language works, has shaped our evolution and is critical to our future.

The Language Game

How improvisation created language and changed the world

James Bridle

What does it mean to be intelligent? Is it something unique to humans - or do we share it with other beings? 
 
Recent years have seen rapid advances in 'artificial' intelligence, which increasingly appears to be something stranger than we ever imagined. At the same time, we are becoming more aware of the other intelligences which have been with us all along, unrecognized. These other beings are the animals, plants, and natural systems that surround us, and are slowly revealing their complexity and knowledge - just as the new technologies we've built are threatening to cause their extinction, and ours. 
 
In Ways of Being, writer and artist James Bridle considers the fascinating, uncanny and multiple ways of existing on earth. What can we learn from these other forms of intelligence and personhood, and how can we change our societies to live more equitably with one another and the non-human world? From Greek oracles to octopuses, forests to satellites, Bridle tells a radical new story about ecology, technology and intelligence. We must, they argue, expand our definition of these terms to build a meaningful and free relationship with the non-human, one based on solidarity and cognitive diversity. We have so much to learn, and many worlds to gain.

Ways of Being

Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence

Tim Birkhead

In Birds and Us, award-winning writer and ornithologist Tim Birkhead takes us on an epic and dazzling journey through this mutual history with birds, from the ibises mummified and deified by Ancient Egyptians to Renaissance experiments on woodpecker anatomy, from Victorian obsessions with egg collecting to the present fight to save endangered species and restore their habitats. 
 
Weaving in stories from his own life as a scientist, including far-flung expeditions to wondrous Neolithic caves in Spain and the bustling guillemot colonies of the Faroe Islands, this rich and fascinating book is the culmination of a lifetime's research and unforgettably shows how birds shaped us, and how we have shaped them.

Birds and Us

A 12,000 Year History, from Cave Art to Conservation

Florence Schechter

Florence Schechter, creator of the world's first Vagina Museum, is here to take you on a journey towards celebrating, understanding and appreciating your vagina. And once you set off, you'll never look back. 
 
By the end of this empowering and inclusive book, you will be ready to talk about the vulva shame-free. You will discover art that admires the vulva. You will learn how our ancestors believed in the power of periods. And you will bust myths, feel confident in your body and find your Big V Energy! 
 
Because, if the word is taboo, how can you talk about your vagina's health? If you can't label the vulva, how can you fight for its rights? And if you don't know how extraordinary the vulva and vagina really are, you'll never realise the incredible power between your legs. 
 
With fascinating contributions from leading activists and experts. 
 
Suitable for ages 14+

An empowering celebration of the vulva and vagina

Lucy Cooke

What does it mean to be female? Mother, carer, the weaker sex? Think again. 
 
Whether it's the female lemurs of Madagascar, dominating the males of their species both physically and politically, the female albatross couples, hooking up together to raise their chicks in Hawaii, or the murderous meerkat mothers of the Kalahari Desert, the bitches in BITCH overturn outdated binary expectations of bodies, brains, biology and behaviour. 
 
In her trailblazing new book, Lucy Cooke offers a timely look at how sexist bias polluted evolutionary biology and through her riotous cast of bad-ass female animals shows the scientific patriarchy what's what.

Bitch

What does it mean to be female?

A Revolutionary Guide to Sex, Evolution and the Female Animal

Thomas Halliday

This is the past as we've never seen it before. 
 
Otherlands is an epic, exhilarating journey into deep time, showing us the Earth as it used to exist, and the worlds that were here before ours. Travelling back in time to the dawn of complex life, and across all seven continents, award-winning young palaeobiologist Thomas Halliday gives us a mesmerizing up close encounter with eras that are normally unimaginably distant. 
 
Halliday immerses us in a series of ancient landscapes, from the mammoth steppe in Ice Age Alaska to the lush rainforests of Eocene Antarctica, with its colonies of giant penguins, to Ediacaran Australia, where the moon is far brighter than ours today. We visit the birthplace of humanity; we hear the crashing of the highest waterfall the Earth has ever known; and we watch as life emerges again after the asteroid hits, and the age of the mammal dawns. These lost worlds seem fantastical and yet every description - whether the colour of a beetle's shell, the rhythm of pterosaurs in flight or the lingering smell of sulphur in the air - is grounded in the fossil record. 
 
Otherlands is a staggering imaginative feat: an emotional narrative that underscores the tenacity of life - yet also the fragility of seemingly permanent ecosystems, including our own. To read it is to see the last 500 million years not as an endless expanse of unfathomable time, but as a series of worlds, simultaneously fabulous and familiar.

Otherlands

A World in the Making

Adam Rutherford

Hannah Fry

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER 
 
'Explores just about every area of life' DAILY MAIL 
 
'If only Adam Rutherford and Hannah Fry were on tap to all of us, all the time . . . The pair have such a gift for making life, numbers and the forces at work in the universe all the richer, stranger, funnier and more marvellous.' Stephen Fry 
 
In Rutherford and Fry's comprehensive guidebook, they tell the complete story of the universe and absolutely everything in it - skipping over some of the boring parts. 
 
This is a celebration of the weirdness of the cosmos, the strangeness of humans and the fact that amid all the mess, we can somehow make sense of life. 
 
Our brains have evolved to tell us all sorts of things that feel intuitively right but just aren't true: the world looks flat, the stars seem fixed in the heavenly firmament, a day is 24 hours... This book is crammed full of tales of how stuff really works. With the power of science, Rutherford and Fry show us how to bypass our monkey-brains, taking us on a journey from the origin of time and space, via planets, galaxies, evolution, the dinosaurs, all the way into our minds, and wrestling with some truly head-scratching questions that only science can answer: 
 
What is time, and where does it come from? 
Why are animals the size and shape they are? 
How horoscopes work (Spoiler: they don't, but you think they do) 
Does my dog love me? 
Why nothing is truly round? 
Do you need your eyes to see? 
 
'A wonderfully engaging blend of wit, enthusiasm, clarity and knowledge.' Bill Bryson 
 
'Like the universe itself, this book is multi-faceted, surprising and full of wonders. It's also funny, wise and exceedingly brainy. You really owe it to yourself to read it.' Tim Harford, author of How To Make The World Add Up

Rutherford and Fry’s Complete Guide to Absolutely Everything (Abridged)

new from the stars of BBC Radio 4

Steven Pinker

In the twenty-first century, humanity is reaching new heights of scientific understanding - and at the same time appears to be losing its mind. How can a species that discovered vaccines for Covid-19 in less than a year produce so much fake news, quack cures and conspiracy theorizing? 
 
 In Rationality, Pinker rejects the cynical cliché that humans are simply an irrational species. After all, we discovered the laws of nature, lengthened and enriched our lives and set the benchmarks for rationality itself. Instead, he explains, we think in ways that suit the low-tech contexts in which we spend most of our lives, but fail to take advantage of the powerful tools of reasoning we have built up over millennia: logic, critical thinking, probability, and decision-making under uncertainty. These tools are not a standard part of our educational curricula, and have never been presented clearly and entertainingly in a single book - until now. 
 
 Rationality matters. It leads to better choices in our lives and in the public sphere, and is the ultimate driver of social justice and moral progress. Brimming with insight and humour, Rationality will enlighten, inspire and empower.

Rationality

What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters

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

Lisa Miller

A groundbreaking exploration of the neuroscience of spirituality and a bold new paradigm for health, healing, and resilience 
 
'Lisa Miller is the leading psychologist of her generation' Martin Seligman 
 
'We can live chasing goals and rewards, lost in worries and regrets. Or we can awaken to the true fabric of the world, an evolving tapestry that we both behold and help to create, in which every thread matters and no strand stands alone' 
 
 Whether it's meditation or a walk in nature, reading a sacred text or saying a prayer, there are many ways to tap into a heightened awareness of the world around us and our place in it. Lisa Miller draws on decades of clinical experience and award-winning research to show that humans are universally equipped with this capacity for spirituality, and that our brains become more resilient and robust as a result of it. Bringing scientific rigour to the most intangible aspect of our lives, Miller's counterintuitive findings reveal the measurable positive effects of spirituality: for better decision-making, a healthier brain and an inspired life. 
 
Brimming with inspiration and compassion, this landmark book revolutionizes our understanding of spirituality, mental health and how to find meaning and purpose in life.

The Awakened Brain

The Psychology of Spirituality

The Psychology of Spirituality and Our Search for Meaning

Jemma Wadham

As one of the world's leading glaciologists, Professor Jemma Wadham has devoted her career to the glaciers that cover one-tenth of the Earth's land surface. Today, however, these 'ice rivers' are in peril. High up in the Alps, Andes and Himalaya, once-indomitable glaciers are retreating; in Antarctica, meanwhile, thinning ice sheets are releasing meltwater to sensitive marine foodwebs, and may be unlocking vast quantities of methane stored deep beneath them. The potential consequences for humanity are almost unfathomable. 
 
Jemma's first encounter with a glacier, as a student, sparked her love of these icy landscapes. There is nowhere on Earth she feels more alive. Whether abseiling down crevasses, skidooing across frozen fjords, exploring ice caverns, or dodging polar bears - for a glaciologist, it's all in a day's work. 
 
Prompted by an illness that took her to the brink of death and back, in Ice Rivers Jemma recalls twenty-five years of expeditions around the globe, revealing why the glaciers mean so much to her - and what they should mean to us. As she guides us from the Alps to the Andes, the importance of the ice to crucial ecosystems and human livelihoods becomes clear - our lives are entwined with these coldest places on the planet. This is a memoir like no other: an eye-witness account by a top scientist at the frontline of the climate crisis, and an impassioned love letter to the glaciers that are her obsession.

Ice Rivers

A Story of Glaciers, Wilderness and Humanity

Rupa Marya

Raj Patel

'A work of exhilarating scope and relevance ... What a rare and powerful experience to feel a book in your very body' Naomi Klein 
 
'Health is not something we can attain as individuals, for ourselves, hermetically sealed off from the world around us. An injury to one is an injury to all.' 
 
Our bodies, societies and planet are inflamed. In this boldly original book, renowned political economist Raj Patel teams up with physician Rupa Marya to illuminate the hidden relationships between human health and the profound injustices of our political and economic systems. In doing so, they offer a radical new cure: the deep medicine of decolonization. 
 
Journeying through the human body - our digestive, endocrine, circulatory, respiratory, reproductive, immune, and nervous systems - Marya and Patel show how inflammation is connected not just to the food that we eat, the air that we breathe and access to healthcare, but is also linked to the traumatic events we experience and the very model of health that doctors practice: one which takes things apart, rather than seeking to bring ideas and lived experiences together. 
 
Combining the latest scholarship on globalization and biology with the stories of patients in marginalized communities and the wisdom of Indigenous groups, Inflamed points the way toward a medicine that heals what has been divided and has the potential to transform not only our bodies but the world.

Inflamed

Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice

Patrick Roberts

Jungle is a new and ambitious history of the world, telling the remarkable story of the world's tropical forests from the arrival of the first plants millions of years ago to the role of tropical forests in the evolution of the world's atmosphere, the dinosaurs, the first mammals and even our own species and ancestors. Highlighting provocative new evidence garnered from cutting-edge research, Dr Roberts shows, for example, that our view of humans as 'savannah specialists' is wildly wrong, and that the 'Anthropocene' began not with the Industrial Revolution, but potentially as early as 6,000 years ago in the tropics. We see that the relationship between humankind and 'jungles' is deep-rooted, that we are all connected to their destruction, and that we must all act to save them. Urgent, clear-sighted and original, Jungle challenges the way we think about the world - and ourselves.

Jungle

How Tropical Forests Shaped World History

How Tropical Forests Shaped World History – and Us

Joe Keohane

In our cities, we barely acknowledge one another on public transport, even as rates of loneliness skyrocket. Online, we carefully curate who we interact with. In our politics, we are increasingly consumed by a fear of people we've never met. But what if strangers, long believed to be the cause of many of our problems, were actually the solution? 
 
In The Power of Strangers, Joe Keohane discovers the surprising benefits that come from talking to strangers, examining how even passing interactions can enhance empathy, happiness and cognitive development, ease loneliness and isolation, and root us in the world, deepening our sense of belonging. Warm, witty, erudite and profound, this deeply researched book will make you reconsider how you perceive and approach strangers, showing you how talking to strangers isn't just not a way to live, it's a way to survive.

The Power of Strangers

The Benefits of Connecting in a Suspicious World

Michael Pollan

Of all the many things humans rely on plants for, surely the most curious is our use of them to change consciousness: to stimulate, calm, or completely alter the qualities of our mental experience. In This Is Your Mind On Plants, Michael Pollan explores three very different drugs - opium, caffeine and mescaline - and throws the fundamental strangeness of our thinking about them into sharp relief. Exploring and participating in the cultures that have grown up around these drugs, while consuming (or in the case of caffeine, trying not to consume) them, Pollan reckons with the powerful human attraction to psychoactive plants, and the equally powerful taboos. 
 
In a unique blend of history, science, memoir and reportage, Pollan shines a fresh light on a subject that is all too often treated reductively. In doing so, he proves that there is much more to say about these plants than simply debating their regulation, for when we take them into our bodies and let them change our minds, we are engaging with nature in one of the most profound ways we can. This ground-breaking and singular book holds up a mirror to our fundamental human needs and aspirations, the operations of our minds and our entanglement with the natural world.

This Is Your Mind On Plants

Opium—Caffeine—Mescaline

Rachael Pells

WIRED

Genome sequencing is one of the most exciting scientific breakthroughs of the past thirty years. But what precisely does it involve and how is it developing? 
 
 In this brilliantly wide-ranging, one-stop guide WIRED journalist Rachael Pells explains the science behind genomics. She analyses its practical applications in medical diagnosis and the treatment of conditions that range from cancer to severe allergic reactions to cystic fibrosis. She considers its potential to help with advances in agriculture and environmental science. She explores the ethics of genetic modification and the dangers involved when humans 'play God'. And she addresses the fundamental question: to what extent will future advances transform human longevity and the quality of life.

Genomics (WIRED guides)

How Genome Sequencing Will Change Our Lives

Herman Pontzer

'Pontzer's findings have huge implications for our attitudes to exercise, diet and public health' Mark Webster, Sunday Times 
 
 A myth-busting tour of the body's hidden foundations from a pioneering evolutionary biologist 
 
 'Public health strategies stubbornly cling to the simplistic armchair engineer's view of metabolism, hurting efforts to combat obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and the other diseases that are most likely to kill us' 
 
 Herman Pontzer's ground-breaking research has revealed how, contrary to received wisdom, exercise does not increase our metabolism. Instead, we burn calories within a very narrow range: nearly 3,000 calories per day, no matter our activity level. 
 
 In this book, he draws on twenty years of cutting-edge science to take a closer look at what happens to the energy we consume. Burn explores the ways in which metabolism controls every aspect of our health - from fertility to immune function - and reveals the truth about the dynamic system that sustains us. 
 
Filled with facts and memorable anecdotes, this book will change the way you think about food, exercise and what really matters for your health.

Burn

The Misunderstood Science of Metabolism

David Graeber

David Wengrow

For generations, our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike - either free and equal, or thuggish and warlike. Civilization, we are told, could be achieved only by sacrificing those original freedoms or, alternatively, by taming our baser instincts. David Graeber and David Wengrow show how such theories first emerged, and why they are wrong. In doing so, they overturn our view of human history, including the origins of farming, cities, democracy, slavery and civilization itself. 
 
 Drawing on path-breaking research in archaeology and anthropology, the authors show how history becomes a far more interesting place once we begin to see what's really there. If humans did not spend 95 per cent of their past in tiny bands of hunter-gatherers, what were they doing all that time? If agriculture and cities did not mean a plunge into hierarchy, then what kinds of organization did they lead to? The answers are often unexpected, and suggest that the course of history may be less set in stone, and more full of playful possibilities than we tend to assume. 
 
 The Dawn of Everything fundamentally transforms our understanding of the human past and offers a path toward imagining new forms of freedom. This is a monumental book of formidable intellectual range, animated by curiosity, moral vision and faith in the power of direct action.

The Dawn of Everything

A New History of Humanity

Dr Richard Shepherd

Through 24 intriguing, never-before-told cases, Britain's top forensic pathologist Dr Richard Shepherd takes us on a journey through life in death. From old to young, murder to misadventure, and from illness to accidental death, each body can reveal something: about human development, about mortality, about its owner's life story, and even about Shepherd himself. 
 From the bestselling author of Unnatural Causes comes a powerful, moving and above all reassuring book uncovering the secrets of death - how to understand it, postpone it, and, when our time comes (as it must), how to embrace it as the last great adventure.

The Seven Ages of Death

‘Every chapter is like a detective story’ Telegraph

Tom Higham

50,000 years ago, we were not the only species of human in the world. There were at least four others, including the Neanderthals, Homo floresiensis, Homo luzonesis and the Denisovans. At the forefront of the latter's ground-breaking discovery was Oxford Professor Tom Higham. In The World Before Us, he explains the scientific and technological advancements - in radiocarbon dating and ancient DNA, for example - that allowed each of these discoveries to be made, enabling us to be more accurate in our predictions about not just how long ago these other humans lived, but how they lived, interacted and live on in our genes today. This is the story of us, told for the first time with its full cast of characters.

The World Before Us

How Science is Revealing a New Story of Our Human Origins

Neil Oliver

THE PERFECT READ FOR TROUBLED TIMES 
 
From the bestselling author of The Story of the British Isles in 100 Places comes this inspiring and beautifully written meditation on the wisdom inherited from our ancestors. 
 
For all we have gained in the modern world, simple peace of mind is hard to find. In a time that is increasingly fraught with complexity and conflict, we are told that our wellbeing relies on remaining as present as possible. But what if the key to being present lies in the past? 
 
In Wisdom of the Ancients, Neil Oliver takes us back in time, to grab hold of the ideas buried in forgotten cultures and early civilizations. From Laetoli footprints in Tanzania to Keralan rituals, stone circles and cave paintings, Oliver takes us on a global journey through antiquity. A master storyteller, drawing on immense knowledge of our ancient past, he distils this wisdom into twelve messages that have endured the test of time, and invites us to consider how these might apply to our lives today. The result is powerful and inspirational, moving and profound.

Wisdom of the Ancients

Life lessons from our distant past

A Private Thriller

A series of children's modern classic novels by renowned 20th century children's writers. All the titles in this series have the A Puffin Book logo, contemporary-style covers, and child-friendly endnotes.

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