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A A Gill

Andrew Swanston read law at Cambridge, but was inspired to write by his lifelong interest in early modern history. His Thomas Hill novels – The King’s Spy, The King’s Exile and The King’s Return – are set against the backdrops of the English Civil War, Cromwell’s Commonwealth and the early Restoration respectively. He is also the author of Waterloo: The Bravest Man and Beautiful Star and Other Stories. His first historical thriller set during the reign of Elizabeth I – Incendium (published in paperback as The Incendium Plot) – introduced readers to the academic, lawyer and intelligencer Dr Christopher Radcliff, whose adventures continue in Chaos. Andrew Swanston lives in Surrey.

A D Swanston

A E Langsford

A G Hopkins

A. J. BAIME is the New York Times best-selling author of The Arsenal of Democracy: FDR, Detroit, and an Epic Quest to Arm an America at War and Go Like Hell: Ford, Ferrari, and Their Battle for Speed and Glory at Le Mans. Both books are in development for major motion pictures. Baime is a longtime regular contributor to the Wall Street Journal, and his articles have also appeared in the New York Times, Popular Science, and Men’s Journal. He lives in Granite Bay, California. Visit him at facebook.com/ajbaime and trumanbook.com.

A J Baime

A J Jacobs

A J P Taylor

Anthony James Pollard is a British medieval historian, specialising in the fifteenth century and in particular the Wars of the Roses. A leading authority in the field, he is profesor emeritus of Teesside University. His books include North-Eastern England during the Wars of the Roses, Richard III and the Princes in theTower, Imagining Robin Hood: the Late Medieval Stories in Historical Context and Warwick the kingmaker: Politics, Power and Fame.

A J Pollard

A J Rochester

A K Benjamin is a clinical neuropsychologist and the author of Let Me Not Be Mad: A Story of Unravelling Minds.

A K Benjamin

A. L. Berridge read English at Oxford, and taught for ten years before moving into television, where her production credits range from period drama and thrillers to long-running soaps. She has written two previous novels, Top Ten besteller Honour and the Sword and In the Name of the King. Into the Valley of Death is her third novel.

A L Berridge

Alison Gaylin's first job was as a reporter for a celebrity tabloid, which sparked a lifelong interest in writing about people committing despicable acts. More than a decade later, she wrote and published her Edgar-nominated first novel, HIDE YOUR EYES. 
 
She's since published nine more books, including the USA Today and international bestselling Brenna Spector suspense series, which has been nominated for the Edgar, Anthony and Thriller awards and won the Shamus award. 
 
She lives in upstate New York with her husband, daughter, cat and dog.

A L Gaylin

A Maxwell-Hyslop

A McArthur

A P Wavell

A.S. Webb is the Sunday Times bestselling author of Daughter of Chaos, the first instalment of The Dark Pantheon Trilogy. She is inspired by stories rooted in history and mythology, that push the boundaries of imagination and urge us to reflect on what it means to be human.

A S Webb

A. A. Dhand is the author of six previous novels, and has been shortlisted for the CWA Steel Dagger Award. His DI Harry Virdee novels are currently being adapted for TV by the BBC. He was raised in Bradford and spent his youth observing the city from behind the counter of a small convenience store. After qualifying as a pharmacist, he worked in London and travelled extensively before returning to Bradford to start his own business and begin writing. The history, diversity and darkness of the city have inspired all his novels. For more information about A. A. Dhand and his books, follow him on X @aadhand, and on Instagram @aa_dhand.

A. A. Dhand

A. A. Gill

A. A. Milne

A. Anatoli

A. B. Poranek grew up sharing her time between Ontario, Canada and rural Poland, and eventually completed a veterinary degree at the Warsaw University of Life Sciences. A lover of mythology and history, she enjoys exploring both in her writing. Her debut novel, Where the Dark Stands Still, an instant New York Times bestseller, is an ode to Poland's folktales, while A Treachery of Swans transports readers to a world inspired by 17th century France.

A. B. Poranek

A. Bradley

Professor A. C. Grayling is Principal of the New College of the Humanities at Northeastern University, London, and a Supernumerary Fellow of St Anne's College, Oxford. He has written and edited over thirty books on philosophy, history, science and current affairs. For several years he wrote columns for the Guardian newspaper and The Times and was the chairman of the 2014 Man Booker Prize.

A. C. Grayling

A.D. Miller is the author of Snowdrops, The Earl of Petticoat Lane and The Faithful Couple. Snowdrops was a bestseller and was shortlisted for many prizes including the Man Booker and the CWA Gold Dagger. It was translated into 25 languages. As Moscow Correspondent of The Economist A.D. Miller has travelled across the former Soviet Union and covered the Orange Revolution in Ukraine; he is now the magazine’s Culture Editor based in London. 
 
admillerbooks.com

A. D. Miller

A. E. Ellis

A. E. W. Mason

A. Humphreys

A. Igoni Barrett was born in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, in 1979 and lives in Lagos. He is a winner of the 2005 BBC World Service short story competition, the recipient of a Chinua Achebe Center Fellowship, a Norman Mailer Center Fellowship, and a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Residency. His short story collection, Love is Power, or Something Like That, was published in 2013. In 2014 he was named on the Africa39 list of sub-Saharan African writers under 40. Blackass is his first novel.

A. Igoni Barrett

The short life of A.J.A. Symons (1900-41) was described by his biographer as an intricate and largely harmless confidence trick. His many interests included the collection of musical boxes and rare books as well as the study and practice of forgery; they left him time to edit an anthology of Edwardian verse and compose studies of H.M. Stanley and other notable figures. He is remembered for The Quest for Corvo, one of the most remarkable biographies ever written, and for co-founding the Wine and Food Society.

A. J. A. Symons

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Kevin Tracey

‘A masterpiece and a timeless document for those who want to see what science is all about: faith, focus, patience and hard work,’ – Wim Hof 
 
‘A game changer … learn how the connection between your brain, gut and immune system can transform your health,’ – Will Bulsiewicz, New York Times bestselling author of Fibre Fuelled 
 
Unlock the secrets to your health and happiness with the power of the vagus nerve 
 
The 200,000 fibres of the vagus nerve vibrate in tune with your health like the instruments of an orchestra. When your vagus nerve is harmonious, you thrive; when it is not, you suffer from poor sleep, low mood, pain, and chronic illness. 
 
In The Great Nerve, Dr Kevin Tracey’s pioneering research reveals how the vagus nerve is linked to regulating the immune system and your overall health. Learn how to support this vital nerve and uncover the truth behind stimulating strategies such as ice baths, meditation, exercise, and breathwork. 
 
Discover the extraordinary science that promises to transform healthcare, where computer chips may regulate blood sugar, and electrical implants may replace medications forever. 
 
The Great Nerve not only revolutionizes how we will understand and treat disease: it gives us unprecedented hope for our health.

The Great Nerve

The New Science of the Vagus Nerve

The New Science of the Vagus Nerve and How to Harness Its Healing Reflexes

Carlo Rovelli

One of our most beloved scientists, a fearless free spirit, Carlo Rovelli is also a masterful storyteller. In this collection of writings, the logbook of an intelligence always on the move, he follows his curiosity and invites us on a voyage through science, literature, philosophy and politics. 
 
Written with his usual clarity and wit, these pieces, most of which were first published in Italian newspapers, range widely across time and space: from Newton's alchemy to Einstein's mistakes, from Nabokov's butterflies to Dante's cosmology, from travels in Africa to the consciousness of an octopus, from mind-altering psychedelic substances to the meaning of atheism. Charming, pithy and elegant, this book is the perfect gateway to the universe of one of the most influential physicists of our age.

There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness

Herman Pontzer

As an evolutionary anthropologist conducting ground-breaking research with human populations around the globe, Herman Pontzer has come to see much more clearly how our genes and environments combine to shape our bodies and our health: for better or worse. In this book, he takes us on a tour of the human body and the surprising ways it can change in response to its environment: from the Andean groups who have developed increased lung capacity to the Sama divers who have larger spleens. He also highlights the critical ways we misinterpret biological adaptations: from healthcare, race and IQ to sex and gender. 
 
With so much of our wellbeing and public discourse centred on human biology, a clear understanding of the distinction between socially constructed and genetic differences is more important than ever. This timely reappraisal of an overlooked science is an essential guide to our remarkable bodies.

Adaptable

The Surprising Science of Human Diversity

Leor Zmigrod

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

The Ideological Brain

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

A Radical Science of Susceptible Minds

Steven D. Levitt

Stephen J. Dubner

Which is more dangerous: a gun or a swimming pool? Why do drug dealers still live with their mums? These may not sound like typical questions for an economist to ask. But Steven D. Levitt is not a typical economist. 
 
Freakonomics is the groundbreaking collaboration between Levitt and award-winning journalist Stephen J. Dubner, that turns the conventional wisdom of economics on is head. Through forceful storytelling and wry insight, Levitt and Dubner show that economics is, at root, the study of incentives — how people get what they want, or need, especially when other people want or need the same thing. 
 
From parenting to crime, sport to politics, fear to traffic jams, asking provocative and profound questions about human motivation, Freakonomics will make you see the familiar world through a completely original lens.

Freakonomics

A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

Alison Wood Brooks

Conversation is at the heart of our relationships and decision-making - but the science behind our everyday interactions, and how to improve them, is little known. 
 
In Talk, Harvard Professor Alison Wood Brooks provides fascinating insights into the power of effective communication. She gives you the tools that her MBA students say transform their lives, bringing together psychology, linguistics, sociology and neuroscience in her original framework: 
 
T – Topics – including the surprising impact of preparing topics before a conversation 
A – Asking – why we need to do more (and why we do less than we think) 
L – Levity – how to find the fun in conversations with anyone 
K – Kindness – how to be a better listener and not simply pretend to be one! 
 
Through her own original research, Brooks shows readers how small changes in how we communicate can make a big difference to our relationships, our careers and our lives.

Talk

The Science of Conversation and the Art of Being Ourselves

Owen O'Kane

Anxiety is a normal and sometimes healthy process, but in a world that feels increasingly unsafe and unpredictable, many of us find ourselves in its grip far more than is comfortable or truly necessary. If you subconsciously believe that worrying or investing in your anxiety will keep you safe, it is easy to get unwittingly hooked on it. To break free of anxiety, you must break free from the underlying beliefs that you cling to and the cyclical thoughts that perpetuate it. Addicted to Anxiety will help you understand anxiety from the perspective of addiction, identifying your triggers and learning how to break your habits and actively replace them with new, more productive behaviours. It will put the power back in your own hands to live a calmer and less anxious life.

Addicted to Anxiety

Dr Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston

Just as surgeons once believed pain was good for their patients, some argue today that death brings meaning to life. But given humans rarely live beyond a century – even while certain whales can thrive for over two hundred years – it’s hard not to see our biological limits as profoundly unfair. No wonder then that most people nearing death wish they still had more time. 
 
Yet, with ever-advancing science, will the ends of our lives always loom so close? For from ventilators to brain implants, modern medicine has been blurring what it means to die. In a lucid synthesis of current neuroscientific thinking, Zeleznikow-Johnston explains that death is no longer the loss of heartbeat or breath, but of personal identity – that the core of our identities is our minds, and that our minds are encoded in the structure of our brains. On this basis, he explores how recently invented brain preservation techniques now offer us all the chance of preserving our minds to enable our future revival. 
 
Whether they fought for justice or cured diseases, we are grateful to those of our ancestors who helped craft a kinder world – yet they cannot enjoy the fruits of the civilization they helped build. But if we work together to create a better future for our own descendants, we may even have the chance to live in it. Because, should we succeed, then just maybe, the future will love us enough to bring us back and share their world with us.

The Future Loves You

How and Why We Should Abolish Death

Anil Ananthaswamy

Machine-learning systems are making life-altering decisions for us: approving mortgage loans, determining whether a tumour is cancerous, or deciding whether someone gets bail. They now influence discoveries in chemistry, biology and physics - the study of genomes, extra-solar planets, even the intricacies of quantum systems. 
 
We are living through a revolution in artificial intelligence that is not slowing down. This major shift is based on simple mathematics, some of which goes back centuries: linear algebra and calculus, the stuff of eighteenth-century mathematics. Indeed by the mid-1850s, a lot of the groundwork was all done. It took the development of computer science and the kindling of 1990s computer chips designed for video games to ignite the explosion of AI that we see all around us today. In this enlightening book, Anil Ananthaswamy explains the fundamental maths behind AI, which suggests that the basics of natural and artificial intelligence might follow the same mathematical rules. 
 
As Ananthaswamy resonantly concludes, to make the most of our most wondrous technologies we need to understand their profound limitations - the clues lie in the maths that makes AI possible.

Why Machines Learn

The Elegant Maths Behind Modern AI

Rob Jackson

Can we really restore the earth’s atmosphere within our lifetime? 
 
Whether through sustainable technologies such as fossil-free steel production, hydrogen-powered ships and electric motorbikes, or natural solutions like rewilding peatlands, people all over the world are finding new ways to travel, feed themselves and drive industry while safeguarding a liveable planet for future generations. 
 
Drawing on decades of research and a vast network of experts, Rob Jackson, Chair of the Global Carbon Project, introduces some of the brilliant innovators behind the boldest solutions to climate change – including an Eritrean agricultural scientist, a Swedish CEO and a Brazilian hydrologist. 
 
Now we have more tools to combat climate change than ever before, Into the Clear Blue Sky traces a clear path to a better future for us all – one that will see us cutting emissions in inventive new ways that protect our health and livelihoods, while repairing the damage we have caused to the atmosphere. This visionary and transformative book is the call to action we need – right now.

Into the Clear Blue Sky

The Path to Restoring Our Atmosphere

Emily Leeming

Genius Gut is a revolutionary guide on what and how to eat to boost your life from the inside out. Written by Dr Emily Leeming, microbiome scientist and registered dietitian, Genius Gut draws on her clinical and research expertise as a registered dietician, microbiome scientist and chef. Packed with practical resources, tables, tips, and lists, this book digests the latest ground-breaking scientific research about the powerful two-way path between our gut and brain, transforming how we eat for our gut health and mood. With 10 proven easy gut-brain hacks that you can mix and match, you will learn how and what to eat for peak emotional and physical well-being without restriction.

Genius Gut

How to Boost Your Mood and Health from the Inside Out

The Life-Changing Science of Eating for Your Second Brain

Matt Parker

Explore the life-changing magic of trigonometry with Matt Parker, stand-up mathematician and No. 1 bestselling author of Humble Pi 
 
Why can no two people ever see the same rainbow? What happens when you pull a pop song apart into pure sine waves and play it back on a piano? Why does the wake behind a duck always form an angle of exactly 39 degrees? And what did mathematicians have to do with the great pig stampede of 2012? The answer to each of these questions can be found in the triangle. 
 
In Love Triangle, stand-up comedian, ex-maths teacher and Sunday Times number one bestselling author Matt Parker is on a mission to prove why we should all show a lot more love for triangles, along with the useful trigonometry and geometry they enable. To make his point, he uses triangles to create his own digital avatar, survive a harrowing motorcycle ride, cut a sandwich into three equal parts, and measure tall buildings while wearing silly shoes. But soon these hare-brained experiments begin to reveal a genuinely important truth: triangles are the hidden pattern beneath the surface of the contemporary world, used in everything from GPS to CGI via Spotify streaming, the play button and your best mate&rsquo;s triangle tattoo. 
 
Join Matt Parker as he demonstrates why there&rsquo;s more to triangles than Pythagoras and SOHCAHTOA. Triangles are everything and everything is triangles.

Love Triangle

The Life-changing Magic of Trigonometry

Kelly Clancy

We play games to learn about the world, to understand our minds and the minds of others, and to make predictions about the future. They're also a lot of fun. But what happens when we mistake games for reality? 
 
Playing With Reality explores the riveting history of games since the Enlightenment, weaving an unexpected path through military theory, biology, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, cognitive psychology and the future of democracy. As neuroscientist and physicist Kelly Clancy shows us, games have been deeply intertwined with the arc of history. War games shaped the outcomes of real wars in nineteenth and twentieth-century Europe. Game theory warped our understanding of human behaviour and brought us to the brink of annihilation - yet still underlies basic assumptions in economics, politics and technology. We used games to teach computers how to learn for themselves, and now we are designing games that will determine the shape of society and future of democracy. 
 
Lucid, thought-provoking, and masterfully told, Playing With Reality makes the bold argument that the human fascination with games is the key to understanding our nature.

Playing with Reality

How Games Shape Our World

Neil D. Lawrence

A vital perspective is missing from the discussions we're having about Artificial Intelligence: what does it mean for our identity? 
 
Our fascination with AI stems from the perceived uniqueness of human intelligence. We believe it's what differentiates us. Fears of AI not only concern how it invades our digital lives, but also the implied threat of an intelligence that displaces us from our position at the centre of the world. 
 
Neil D. Lawrence's visionary book shows why these fears may be misplaced. Atomism, proposed by Democritus, suggested it was impossible to continue dividing matter down into ever smaller components: eventually we reach a point where a cut cannot be made (the Greek for uncuttable is 'atom'). In the same way, by slicing away at the facets of human intelligence that can be replaced by machines, AI uncovers what is left: an indivisible core that is the essence of humanity. 
 
By contrasting our own (evolved, locked-in, embodied) intelligence with the capabilities of machine intelligence through history, The Atomic Human reveals the technical origins, capabilities and limitations of AI systems, and how they should be wielded. Not just by the experts, but ordinary people. Either AI is a tool for us, or we become a tool of AI. Understanding this will enable readers to choose the future we want.

The Atomic Human

Understanding Ourselves in the Age of AI

Tim Coulson

How did everything start? 
 
And how did we come to exist? 
 
In one book Oxford Professor Tim Coulson seeks to simply explain what science tells us about the history of the universe from the Big Bang to the existence of humanity, and whether our existence was always inevitable or if we are just incredibly lucky. 
 
Coulson's engaging and accessible storytelling will enthral even the most reluctant of readers with its exploration of what thousands of years of study has told us about who we are, where we came from and what happens next.

A Little History of Everything

From the Big Bang to You

Duncan Harding

A likeable young girl burns her family home to the ground 
 
A man has no memory of the night he killed his wife 
 
A teenager’s visions have murderous effect 
 
One question binds the cases of Dr Duncan Harding, Britain’s top forensic psychiatrist: Why? 
 
Growing up in a violent home, Harding became a doctor to be good and kind. His journey brought him to psychopaths, to the limits of his compassion and to the darkest corners of his own troubled past. 
 
But he’s never turned away nor given up hope. Mesmerising, insightful and redemptive, The Criminal Mind is his unforgettable story.

The Criminal Mind

J. Doyne Farmer

We live in an age of increasing complexity, where accelerating technology and global interconnection hold more promise – and more peril – than any other time in human history. The fossil fuels that have powered global wealth creation now threaten to destroy the world they helped build. Automation and digitization promise prosperity for some, unemployment for others. Financial crises fuel growing inequality, polarization and the retreat of democracy. At heart, all these problems are rooted in the economy, yet the guidance provided by economic models has often failed. 
 
Many books have been written about Doyne Farmer and his work, but Making Sense of Chaos is the first in his own words. It presents a manifesto for how to do economics better. A tale of science and ideas, Farmer fuses his profound knowledge and expertise with stories from his life to explain how we can bring a scientific revolution to bear on the economic conundrums facing society. 
 
Using big data and ever more powerful computers, we are now able for the first time to apply complex systems science to economic activity, building realistic models of the global economy. The resulting simulations and the emergent behavior we observe form the cornerstone of the science of complexity economics, allowing us to test ideas and make significantly better economic predictions – to better address the hard problems facing the world.

Making Sense of Chaos

A Better Economics for a Better World

Lisa Kaltenegger

For thousands of years, humans have wondered whether we're alone in the cosmos. Now, for the first time, we have the technology to investigate. The question should have an obvious answer: yes or no. But once you try to find life elsewhere, you realize it is not so simple. How do you find it over cosmic distances? What actually is life? 
 
As founding director of Cornell University's Carl Sagan Institute, astrophysicist Lisa Kaltenegger built a team of tenacious scientists from many disciplines to create a uniquely specialized toolkit to find life on faraway worlds. In Alien Earths, she demonstrates how we can use our homeworld as a Rosetta Stone, creatively analyzing Earth's history and its astonishing biosphere to inform this search. With infectious enthusiasm, she takes us on an eye-opening journey to the most unusual exoplanets that have shaken our worldview - planets covered in oceans of lava, lonely wanderers lost in space, and others with more than one sun in their sky! And the best contenders for Alien Earths. We also see the imagined worlds of science fiction and how close they come to reality. 
 
We live in an incredible new epoch of exploration. As our witty and knowledgeable tour guide, Professor Kaltenegger shows how we discover not merely new continents, like the explorers of old, but whole new worlds circling other stars and how we could spot life there. Worlds from where aliens may even be gazing back at us. What if we're not alone?

Alien Earths

The Search for Life in the Cosmos

Planet Hunting in the Cosmos

Rahul Jandial

A TIMES AND SUNDAY TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR 2024 
 
'COMPLETELY TRANSFORMED MY WAY OF THINKING ABOUT DREAMS' Jay Shetty 
'A JOURNEY THROUGH NEUROSCIENCE, NEUROCHEMISTRY, MAGIC, MYSTERY . . . A FANTASTIC READ' Dr Rangan Chatterjee 
'TRANSFORMATIONAL' Julia Samuel 
'ELEGANTLY LIFTS THE CURTAIN ON THE DREAMSCAPE TERRITORY' David Eagleman 
'THIS BOOK WILL CHANGE YOUR LIFE' Lewis Howes 
'OUR POET LAUREATE OF NEUROSCIENCE' Greg Whyte 
'AN INSTANT CLASSIC' Bryan Fogel 
 
Dreams are a source of mystery. They have changed the course of individual lives and the world, spurring business deals, inspiring art and scientific breakthroughs, triggering military invasions and mental breakdowns. Yet the source of dreams is not mysterious. They are the product of an extraordinary transformation that occurs in the brain each night when we sleep. 
 
In this pioneering book, bestselling neurosurgeon Rahul Jandial delves into the dreaming brain and shares stories from his own practice to show the astonishing impact that dreams have on our waking life. He explains how dreaming of an exam might help you score up to 20% higher, why taking a long nap could make you better at problem-solving, and even that certain dream disorders can warn you of serious diseases like Parkinson’s years ahead of other symptoms. He offers clear and compelling advice, backed by new research, to become a lucid dreamer, understand your dreaming patterns and unleash their creative power. 
 
Sharing the very latest discoveries in modern neuroscience, This Is Why You Dream provides answers to some fundamental questions: Why do we dream? How do we dream? What do dreams mean? And perhaps, most importantly, do we sleep in order to dream?

This Is Why You Dream

What your sleeping brain reveals about your waking life

Chris Thorogood

As a child, Chris Thorogood dreamed of seeing Rafflesia - the plant with the world's largest flowers. He crafted life-size replicas in an abandoned cemetery, carefully bringing them to life with paper and paint. Today he is a botanist at the University of Oxford's Botanic Garden and has dedicated his life to studying the biology of such extraordinary plants, working alongside botanists and foresters in Southeast Asia to document these huge, mysterious blooms. 
 
Pathless Forest is the story of his journey to study and protect this remarkable plant - a biological enigma, still little understood, which invades vines as a leafless parasite and steals its food from them. We join him on a mind-bending adventure, as he faces a seemingly impenetrable barrier of weird, wonderful and sometimes fearsome flora; finds himself smacking off leeches, hanging off vines, wading through rivers; and following indigenous tribes into remote, untrodden rainforests in search of Rafflesia's ghostly, foul-smelling blooms, more than a metre across. 
 
We depend on plants for our very existence, but two in five of the world's species are threatened with extinction - nobody knows how many species of Rafflesia might already have disappeared through deforestation. Pathless Forest is part thrilling adventure story and part an inspirational call to action to safeguard a fast-disappearing wilderness. To view plants in a different way, as vital for our own future as for that of the planet we share. And to see if Rafflesia itself can be saved.

Pathless Forest

The Quest to Save the World’s Largest Flowers

Monty Lyman

Until a decade ago, we misunderstood a fundamental aspect of human health. Although the brain and the body have always been viewed as separate entities – treated in separate hospitals – science now shows that they are intimately linked. Startlingly, we now know that our immune system is in constant communication with our brain and can directly alter our mental health. This has opened up a new frontier in medicine. Could inflammation cause depression, and arthritis drugs cure it? Can gut microbes shape your behaviour through the vagus nerve? Can something as simple as brushing your teeth properly reduce your risk of dementia? Could childhood infections lie behind neurological and psychiatric disorders such as tics and OCD? 
 
In The Immune Mind, Dr Monty Lyman explores the fascinating connection between the mind, immune system and microbiome. A specialist in the cutting-edge field of immunopsychiatry, Lyman argues that we need to change the way we treat disease and the way we see ourselves. For the first time, we have a new approach to medicine that treats the whole human being.

The Immune Mind

The new science of health

Mark Miodownik

Why are most gases invisible, odourless and tasteless? Why do some poison us and others make us laugh? And why do some power our engines while others make drinks fizzy? In It's a Gas, Mark Miodownik masterfully reveals an invisible world through his unique brand of scientific storytelling. 
 
Taking us back to that exhilarating – and often dangerous – moment when scientists tried to work out exactly what they had discovered, Miodownik shows that gases are the formative substances of our modern world, each with its own weird and wonderful personality. 
We see how seventeenth-century laughing gas parties led to the first use of anaesthetics in surgery, how the invention of the air valve in musical instruments gave us bicycles, cars and trainers, and how gases made us masters of the sea (by huge steamships) and skies (via extremely flammable balloons). This delight of a book reveals the immense importance of gases to modern civilisation.

It's a Gas

The Magnificent and Elusive Elements that Expand Our World

Richard Dawkins

The God Delusion caused a sensation when it was published in 2006. Within weeks it became the most hotly debated topic, with Dawkins himself branded as either saint or sinner for presenting his hard-hitting, impassioned rebuttal of religion of all types. 
 
His argument could hardly be more topical. While Europe is becoming increasingly secularized, the rise of religious fundamentalism, whether in the Middle East or Middle America, is dramatically and dangerously dividing opinion around the world. In America, and elsewhere, a vigorous dispute between 'intelligent design' and Darwinism is seriously undermining and restricting the teaching of science. In many countries religious dogma from medieval times still serves to abuse basic human rights such as women's and gay rights. And all from a belief in a God whose existence lacks evidence of any kind. 
 
Dawkins attacks God in all his forms. He eviscerates the major arguments for religion and demonstrates the supreme improbability of a supreme being. He shows how religion fuels war, foments bigotry and abuses children. 
 
The God Delusion is a brilliantly argued, fascinating polemic: required reading for anyone interested in this most emotional and important subject.

The God Delusion

Chris Lintott

Our view of the Universe is changing. The timeless heavens, turning ceaselessly above us, have been revealed to be dynamic and ever-changing, requiring a new kind of astronomy. On mountaintops and in deserts around the world, new telescopes are being built to show us this changing sky. But amongst all this technological development, the major astronomical events of the past century have largely come about by accident - found not by careful experiment but as surprises when we were looking for something else entirely. 
 
- The most promising habitat for life beyond Earth turns out to be Saturn's tiny moon Enceladus, whose oceans were revealed as NASA's Cassini probe happened to swing by. 
 
- Pulsars, the remnants of long-dead massive stars, were originally just 'scruff' in the data of radio astronomers looking at distant galaxies. 
 
- Telescopes around the world sprung into action to follow the visit of our first, unexpected, interstellar visitor, an asteroid from another system. 
 
- And we get the most from the Hubble Space Telescope by pointing it at nothing ... 
 
Chris Lintott takes us on an astonishing tour of accidents and human error in pursuit of asteroids, pulsars, radio waves, new stars and alien life. On the threshold of opening a new window on the cosmos through new surveys and instruments, his book is an urgent argument for how keeping an open mind can benefit us all - whatever might still be out there for us to find. 
 
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Praise for Chris Lintott 
'Superbly written insights.' - Professor Brian Cox 
'Chris Lintott is a modest genius. He has quietly revolutionized modern astronomy.' Brian May 
'Lintott deftly interweaves personal experience and more philosophical ruminations.' Michael West, Nature

Our Accidental Universe

Stories of Discovery from Asteroids to Aliens

Dr. Kelly Weinersmith

Zach Weinersmith

Earth is not well. The promise of starting life anew somewhere far, far away - no climate change, no war, no Twitter - beckons, and settling the stars finally seems within our grasp. Or is it? Bestselling authors Kelly and Zach Weinersmith set out to write the essential guide to a glorious future of space settlements, but after years of original research, and interviews with leading space scientists, engineers and legal experts, they aren't so sure it's a good idea. Space tech and space business are progressing fast, but we lack the deep knowledge needed to have space-kids, build space-farms and create space nations in a way that doesn't spark conflict back home. In a world hurtling toward human expansion into space, A City on Mars investigates whether the dream of new worlds won't create a nightmare, both for settlers and the people they leave behind. 
 
With deep expertise, a winning sense of humour and art from the beloved creator of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, the Weinersmiths investigate perhaps the biggest questions humanity will ever ask itself - whether and how to become multiplanetary.

A City on Mars

Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through?

Camilla Nord

There are many routes to mental wellbeing and award-winning neuroscientist Camilla Nord is at the forefront of finding them. In this ground-breaking book, she offers a revelatory tour of the scientific and technological developments that are revolutionizing the way we think about mental health, showing why and how events - and treatments - can affect people in such different ways. 
 
In The Balanced Brain, Nord reframes mental health as an intricate, self-regulating process, one which is different for all of us. She examines a huge diversity of treatments, from therapy to medication, to show how they work, and why they sometimes don't. In doing so, she reveals how the small things we do to lift our mood during the course of a day - a piece of chocolate, a coffee, chatting to a friend - often work on the same pathways in our brain as the latest pharmacological treatments for mental health disorders. Whether they help us to manage pain, learn from experience or expend energy on the things that are important for our survival, these conscious actions are part of a complex self-regulating process that is unique to each individual and the constant backdrop to our everyday lives. 
 
Nord shows that, with so many factors at play, there are more possibilities for recovery and resilience than we might think. This book is an invitation to discover those pathways, in order to help us identify what makes each of us feel better - and why.

The Balanced Brain

The Science of Mental Health

Gareth Moore

From the riddles of the ancients to puzzles that perplex the greatest minds of today, The Penguin Book of Puzzles is a glorious compendium of conundrums from throughout history, together for the first time in one collection. 
 
These challenges will require all the reader's wits to solve, but range from the easy to the brain-bending and are suitable for novice and veteran puzzlers alike. There is something here to suit every taste, including popular puzzles such as crosswords and sudoku, but also some surprising and intriguing types of puzzles that have been unearthed from centuries gone by.

The Penguin Book of Puzzles

Kate Kitagawa

Timothy Revell

Mathematics shapes almost everything we do. But despite its reputation as the study of fundamental truths, the stories we have been told about it are wrong. In The Secret Lives of Numbers, historian Kate Kitagawa and journalist Timothy Revell introduce readers to the mathematical boundary-smashers who have been erased by history because of their race, gender or nationality. 
 
From the brilliant Arabic scholars of the ninth-century House of Wisdom, and the pioneering African American mathematicians of the twentieth century, to the 'lady computers' around the world who revolutionised our knowledge of the night sky, we meet these fascinating trailblazers and see how they contributed to our global knowledge today. 
 
This revisionist, completely accessible and radically inclusive history of mathematics is as entertaining as it is important.

The Secret Lives of Numbers

A Global History of Mathematics & Its Unsung Trailblazers

A Global History of Mathematics & its Unsung Trailblazers

Chip Heath

Karla Starr

Until very recently, most languages had no words for numbers greater than five &ndash; anything from six to infinity was known as 'lots'. Understanding numbers is essential in the modern world, but we simply aren&rsquo;t built to understand them. 
 
What does 5GB of storage actually mean? (Two months of commutes, without repeating a song.) What&rsquo;s the size of a nucleus compared to a cell? (Imagine a bee in a cathedral.) How much bigger is a billion than a million? (Well, a million seconds is twelve days. A billion seconds is&hellip;thirty-two years.) 
 
Drawing on years of research into making ideas stick, Chip Heath and Karla Starr outline six critical principles that will give anyone the tools to understand and communicate numbers with more transparency and meaning. Offering practical principles to help us imagine numbers at all scales, Making Numbers Count shows us how to transform them into concrete, vivid and meaningful messages so that we can make better decisions every day.

Making Numbers Count

The art and science of communicating numbers

Robert Zubrin

Within a few years, humans will be able to voyage to Mars. SpaceX is at the forefront of companies already building fleets of spaceships to make interplanetary travel as affordable as Old-World passage to America &ndash; to the then New World. We will settle the red planet, transforming its raw materials into resources and tackling the challenges that await us, creating a new frontier for humankind. 
 
Dr Robert Zubrin explains how populous Martian city-states will emerge, producing their own air, water, food, power and more. How they must be beautiful to attract settlers, and what that might look like. How the primary exports are unlikely to be material goods but intellectual products, created by a technically adept population in a frontier environment where people will be forced to innovate &ndash; including GMOs, robotics, AI and power production. Zubrin even predicts the red planet&rsquo;s customs, social relations and government &ndash; of the people, by the people, for the people, with inalienable individual rights &ndash; that will overcome traditional forms of oppression to draw talented Earth immigrants. 
 
In 1776, Thomas Paine wrote &lsquo;We have it in our power to begin the world over again&rsquo;. Zubrin inspires us to embrace another magnificent future today. With the right pieces in place, his red planet will become a pressure cooker for invention, benefiting humans on Earth, Mars and beyond. The New World on Mars proves that there is no point killing each other over provinces on Earth when, together, we can create planets.

The New World on Mars

What We Can Create on the Red Planet

The year is 1Q84. This is the real world, there is no doubt about that. But in this world, there are two moons in the sky. Discover the 1Q84 Trilogy by Haruki Murakami.

1Q84

365 Days of Art

A BBC Christmas

A Black Book Thriller

A Box Full of Murders

A Cal Leandros Novel

A Christmas Mystery

The intelligent and capable police commissioner Guido Brunetti confronts crime in and around his home town of Venice.

A Commissario Brunetti Mystery

A DC Smith / Kings Lake Investigation Series

A Daisy Story

Chronicling the lives of over three hundred characters, unrivalled for its scope and humour, this is a unique evocation of life in twentieth-century England.

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