Did you know that rain sometimes falls red? Or that the equivalent of one truckload of plastic is dumped in our oceans every minute? This visually stunning book is filled with 100 fascinating facts, bright, infographic illustrations, information on ways we can help our planet and links to specially selected websites to find out more.
We got ourselves into this. Here's how we can get ourselves out. We know the problem: the amount of biodiversity loss, the scale of waste and pollution, the amount of greenhouse gas we pump into the air... it's unsustainable. We have to do something. And we are resourceful, adaptable and smart. We have already devised many ways to reduce climate…
In this compelling, powerful book, highly respected writer and commentator Jack Holland sets out to answer a daunting question: how do you explain the oppression and brutalization of half the world’s population by the other half, throughout history? The result takes the reader on an eye-opening journey through centuries, continents and civilizations as it looks at both historical and contemporary…
‘We spend our whole lives in one body and yet most of us have practically no idea how it works and what goes on inside it. The idea of the book is simply to try to understand the extraordinary contraption that is us.’ Bill Bryson sets off to explore the human body, how it functions and its remarkable ability to…
In this landmark work, four of the world's leading scholar-activists set out a vital, urgent manifesto for a truly intersectional, internationalist, abolitionist feminism. As a politics and as a practice, abolitionism has increasingly shaped our political moment, amplified through the worldwide protests following the 2020 murder of George Floyd by a uniformed police officer. It is at the heart of…
In the stirring, highly anticipated first volume of his presidential memoirs, Barack Obama tells the story of his improbable odyssey from young man searching for his identity to leader of the free world, describing in strikingly personal detail both his political education and the landmark moments of the first term of his historic presidency-a time of dramatic transformation and turmoil.…
n Poems to Live Your Life By, Chris Riddell, political cartoonist for the Observer, has selected his very favourite classic and modern poems about life, death and everything in between. This gorgeously illustrated collection includes forty-six poems and is divided into sections covering: musings, youth, family, love, imaginings, nature, war and endings. Chris Riddell brings them to life with his…
Reducing energy use is the single biggest challenge facing architecture today. From the humblest prehistoric hut to the imposing monuments of Rome or Egypt to super-connected modern airports, buildings in every era and place have been shaped by the energy available for their construction and running. This original and compelling survey tells the story of our buildings from our hunter-gatherer…
What would happen if you fell into a Black Hole? Black holes are found throughout the universe. They can be microscopic. They can be billions of times larger than our Sun. They are dark on the outside but not on the inside. Anything that enters them can never escape, and yet they contain nothing at all. In Black Hole Survival…
With every breath, you literally inhale the history of the world. On the ides of March, 44 BC, Julius Caesar died of stab wounds in the Roman Senate, but the story of his last breath is still unfolding. In fact, you're probably inhaling some of it now. Of the sextillions of molecules entering or leaving your lungs at this moment,…
Why is the Earth's climate changing? And how will this change our lives? HRH The Prince of Wales is worried about climate change. In this book, he explains why it is so important for us to stop climate change now, and he shows how we can do it. Penguin Readers is a series of popular classics, exciting contemporary fiction, and…
Packed with more coffee knowledge than your local roaster and faithful barista combined, this fun, cleverly illustrated, highly informative guide presents a whole new way to understand and enjoy all types of coffee. Perfect for the coffee novice, it's also chock-full of expert information that even the most seasoned coffee lover will find useful and interesting. Coffee: It's Not Rocket…
A personal and powerful essay from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the bestselling author of Americanah and Half of a Yellow Sun. ‘I would like to ask that we begin to dream about and plan for a different world. A fairer world. A world of happier men and happier women who are truer to themselves. And this is how to start: we…
Why is psychiatry such big business? Why are so many psychiatric drugs prescribed - 47 million antidepressant prescriptions in the UK alone last year - and why, without solid scientific justification, has the number of mental disorders risen from 106 in 1952 to 374 today?The everyday sufferings and setbacks of life are now 'medicalised' into illnesses that require treatment -…
In space the sun rises and sets 16 times a day. You fly over every sea, every mountain and desert, every city and every port. The most ordinary things -- eating, sleeping, brushing your teeth or cutting your hair -- have to be relearned, until they become familiar again. This is the story of Samantha Cristoforetti's incredible journey to becoming…
How has feminism developed? What have feminists achieved? What can we learn from the global history of feminism? Feminism is the ongoing story of a profound historical transformation. Despite being repeatedly written off as a political movement that has achieved its aim of female liberation, it has been continually redefined as new generations of women campaign against the gender inequity…
Combined for the first time here are Maus I: A Survivor's Tale and Maus II - the complete story of Vladek Spiegelman and his wife, living and surviving in Hitler's Europe. By addressing the horror of the Holocaust through cartoons, the author captures the everyday reality of fear and is able to explore the guilt, relief and extraordinary sensation of…
What does it mean to be a good man? To be a good father, or a good partner? A good brother, or a good friend? In this clear-sighted analysis, social historian Ivan Jablonka offers a re-examination of the patriarchy and its impact on men. Ranging widely across cultures, from Mesopotamia to Confucianism to Christianity to the revolutions of the eighteenth…
FROM THE AUTHOR OF THE NUMBER ONE BESTSELLER SAPIENS Sapiens showed us where we came from. Homo Deus shows us where we’re going. War is obsolete. You are more likely to commit suicide than be killed in conflict. Famine is disappearing. You are at more risk of obesity than starvation. Death is just a technical problem. Equality is out -…
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Salt Sugar Fat comes a "gripping" (The Wall Street Journal) exposé of how the processed food industry exploits our evolutionary instincts, the emotions we associate with food, and legal loopholes in their pursuit of profit over public health. "The processed food industry has managed to avoid being…
Go on a journey from bean to brew and explore the history of coffee, its production and how to become an expert barista at home. Are you a coffee lover who wants to learn how to extract the perfect brew? This coffee guide is a must-have for anyone looking for information and inspiration to experiment with different beans, methods, and…
Punchy and to the point. No beating around the bush. This brilliant book contains all the information we need to have in our back pocket in order to move forward' Christiana Figueres, Former Executive Secretary UN Climate Change Convention 'Amazing book' Chris Evans, Virgin Radio Breakfast Show 'Everyone should have this book' Rick Edwards, BBC Radio 5 Live 'A timely…
Lord of the Flies is a thought-provoking novel authored by William Golding in 1954. The book describes in detail the horrific exploits of a band of young children who make a striking transition from civilized to barbaric. Lord of the Flies commands a pessimistic outlook that seems to show that man is inherently tied to society, and without it, we…
In the seventy thousand years that modern human beings have walked this earth, we’ve come a long way. Art, science, culture, trade – on the evolutionary food chain, we’re real winners. But, frankly, it’s not exactly been plain sailing, and sometimes – just occasionally – we’ve managed to really, truly, quite unbelievably f*ck things up. From Chairman Mao’s Four Pests…
As the BBC’s North America Editor, Jon Sopel has had a pretty busy time of it lately. In the time it’s taken for a reality star to go from laughing stock to leader of the free world, Jon has travelled the length and breadth of the United States, experiencing it from a perspective that most of us could only dream…
The Simulmatics Corporation, founded in 1959, mined data, targeted voters, accelerated news, manipulated consumers, destabilized politics, and disordered knowledge–decades before Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Cambridge Analytica. Silicon Valley likes to imagine it has no past but the scientists of Simulmatics are the long-dead grandfathers of Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. Borrowing from psychological warfare, they used computers to predict and…
Imagine a world where your phone is too big for your hand, where your doctor prescribes a drug that is wrong for your body, where in a car accident you are 47% more likely to be seriously injured, where every week the countless hours of work you do are not recognised or valued. If any of this sounds familiar, chances…
Do you ever think about your body and how it all works? Like really properly think about it? The human body is extraordinary and fascinating and, well . . . pretty weird. Yours is weird, mine is weird, your maths teacher's is even weirder. This book is going to tell you what's actually going on in there, and answer the…
The only numbers in this book are the page numbers. Math Without Numbers is a vivid and wholly original guide to the three main branches of abstract math - topology, analysis, and algebra - which turn out to be surprisingly easy to grasp. Milo Beckerman upends the conventional approach to mathematics, inviting you to think creatively about shape and dimension,…
'In philosophy, one must start from scratch - & it takes a very long time to reach scratch' Iris Murdoch, Mary Midgley, Philippa Foot and Elizabeth Anscombe were philosophy students at Oxford during the Second World War when most male undergraduates (and many tutors) were conscripted. Taught by refugee scholars, women and conscientious objectors, the four friends developed a philosophy…
The extraordinary efforts that took mankind to the moon 50 years ago were more than a scientific feat of aeronautics. They required new forms of collaboration between the public sector (notably, NASA) and private companies. This book asks: what if the same level of boldness - the boldness that set inspirational goals, took risks and explicitly recognized that this requires…
A personal and powerful essay from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the bestselling author of Americanah and Half of a Yellow Sun. ‘I would like to ask that we begin to dream about and plan for a different world. A fairer world. A world of happier men and happier women who are truer to themselves. And this is how to start: we…
The astonishing New York Times bestseller that chronicles how a brain scientist's own stroke led to enlightenment On December 10, 1996, Jill Bolte Taylor, a thirty-seven- year-old Harvard-trained brain scientist experienced a massive stroke in the left hemisphere of her brain. As she observed her mind deteriorate to the point that she could not walk, talk, read, write, or recall…
Over the last 20 years, New York City has been convulsed by enormous challenges: terrorist attack, blackout, hurricane, recession, pandemic. New Yorkers is a grand portrait of the irrepressible city and a hymn to the vitality and resilience of its people. Craig Taylor spent years meeting New Yorkers – rich and poor, old and young, native and immigrant – and…
WINNER OF THE BAILEYS PRIZE BEST OF THE BEST Winner of the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction 2007, this is a heartbreaking, exquisitely written literary masterpiece Ugwu, a boy from a poor village, works as a houseboy for a university professor. Olanna, a young woman, has abandoned her life of privilege in Lagos to live with her charismatic new lover,…
We all use a lot of plastic every day. It is cheap and strong, and plastic things last. But where does plastic come from? And what can we do to recycle all the plastic in our world? Penguin Readers is a series of popular classics, exciting contemporary fiction, and thought-provoking non-fiction written for learners of English as a foreign language.…
A personal and powerful essay from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the bestselling author of Americanah and Half of a Yellow Sun. ‘I would like to ask that we begin to dream about and plan for a different world. A fairer world. A world of happier men and happier women who are truer to themselves. And this is how to start: we…
These books gave Matilda a hopeful and comforting message: you are not alone. Matilda is a brilliant child with a magical mind. But her parents have decided she's just a nuisance who wastes too much time on reading and stories. And her headmistress Miss Trunchball is a terrible bully, who thinks children are rotten and awful and should be locked…
The groundbreaking Sunday Times bestseller from Tim Spector, author of The Diet Myth and creator of the COVID Symptom Study app. 'A hugely enjoyable and critical look at common food myths' Michael Mosley Is breakfast really the most important meal of the day? Is there any point in counting calories? Is there any evidence that coffee is bad for us?…
An icon of the last fifty years, Stephen Hawking seems to encapsulate genius: not since Albert Einstein has a scientific figure held such a position in popular consciousness. In this enthralling memoir, writer and physicist Leonard Mlodinow tells the story of his friend and their friendship, offering an intimate account of this giant of science. The two met in 2003,…
What can Alice in Wonderland teach us about childhood? Could reading Conversations with Friends guide us through first love? Does Esther Greenwood’s glittering success and subsequent collapse in The Bell Jar help us understand ambition? And, finally, what can we learn about death from Virginia Woolf? Literature matters. Not only does it provide escapism and entertainment, but it also holds…
What can Alice in Wonderland teach us about childhood? Could reading Conversations with Friends guide us through first love? Does Esther Greenwood’s glittering success and subsequent collapse in The Bell Jar help us understand ambition? And, finally, what can we learn about death from Virginia Woolf? Literature matters. Not only does it provide escapism and entertainment, but it also holds…
'I've been telling everyone I know about Mary Lawson . . . Each of her novels is just a marvel' Anne Tyler Clara's rebellious older sister is missing. Grief-stricken and bewildered, she yearns to uncover the truth about what happened. Liam, newly divorced and newly unemployed, moves into the house next door and within hours gets a visit from the…
‘We spend our whole lives in one body and yet most of us have practically no idea how it works and what goes on inside it. The idea of the book is simply to try to understand the extraordinary contraption that is us.’ Bill Bryson sets off to explore the human body, how it functions and its remarkable ability to…
Chuck Palahniuk showed himself to be his generation’s most visionary satirist in this, his first book. Fight Club’s estranged narrator leaves his lackluster job when he comes under the thrall of Tyler Durden, an enigmatic young man who holds secret after-hours boxing matches in the basement of bars. There, two men fight "as long as they have to." This is…
Go on a journey from bean to brew and explore the history of coffee, its production and how to become an expert barista at home. Are you a coffee lover who wants to learn how to extract the perfect brew? This coffee guide is a must-have for anyone looking for information and inspiration to experiment with different beans, methods, and…
In the stirring, highly anticipated first volume of his presidential memoirs, Barack Obama tells the story of his improbable odyssey from young man searching for his identity to leader of the free world, describing in strikingly personal detail both his political education and the landmark moments of the first term of his historic presidency-a time of dramatic transformation and turmoil.…
We know the universe had a beginning. But what happens at the end of the story? With lively wit and wry humour, astrophysicist Katie Mack takes us on a mind-bending tour through each of the cosmos' possible finales: the Big Crunch, Heat Death, Vacuum Decay, the Big Rip and the Bounce. Guiding us through major concepts in quantum mechanics, cosmology,…
Was there a beginning of time? Could time run backwards? Is the universe infinite or does it have boundaries? These are just some of the questions considered in the internationally acclaimed masterpiece by the world renowned physicist - generally considered to have been one of the world's greatest thinkers. It begins by reviewing the great theories of the cosmos from…
'I've been telling everyone I know about Mary Lawson . . . Each of her novels is just a marvel' Anne Tyler Clara's rebellious older sister is missing. Grief-stricken and bewildered, she yearns to uncover the truth about what happened. Liam, newly divorced and newly unemployed, moves into the house next door and within hours gets a visit from the…
Why do we find it so hard to say 'No'? How can feminism be more inclusive? What can rom-coms tell us about taking charge? The Guilty Feminist will challenge you, reassure you and empower you to see the world differently. From inclusion to intersectionality, #MeToo to men's rights, rom-coms to pornography, Deborah Frances-White tackles urgent questions for the modern woman.…
What does it mean to be a good man? To be a good father, or a good partner? A good brother, or a good friend? In this clear-sighted analysis, social historian Ivan Jablonka offers a re-examination of the patriarchy and its impact on men. Ranging widely across cultures, from Mesopotamia to Confucianism to Christianity to the revolutions of the eighteenth…
In The Madness of Crowds Douglas Murray investigates the dangers of 'woke' culture and the rise of identity politics. In lively, razor-sharp prose he examines the most controversial issues of our moment: sexuality, gender, technology and race, with interludes on the Marxist foundations of 'wokeness', the impact of tech and how, in an increasingly online culture, we must relearn the…
Combined for the first time here are Maus I: A Survivor's Tale and Maus II - the complete story of Vladek Spiegelman and his wife, living and surviving in Hitler's Europe. By addressing the horror of the Holocaust through cartoons, the author captures the everyday reality of fear and is able to explore the guilt, relief and extraordinary sensation of…
Until the twentieth century, art history was, in the main, written by white men who tended to write about other white men. The idea that women in the West have always made art was rarely cited as a possibility. Yet they have – and, of course, continue to do so – often against tremendous odds, from laws and religion to…
n Poems to Live Your Life By, Chris Riddell, political cartoonist for the Observer, has selected his very favourite classic and modern poems about life, death and everything in between. This gorgeously illustrated collection includes forty-six poems and is divided into sections covering: musings, youth, family, love, imaginings, nature, war and endings. Chris Riddell brings them to life with his…
What is phantom limb pain? Can words actually hurt? Why do we experience pain, even after we've healed? We're currently experiencing a Renaissance in pain science. In recent years our understanding of pain has altered so radically it's fair to say that everything we thought we knew about pain is wrong. As Dr Monty Lyman reveals, we misunderstand pain -…
Feminism is the insight that sexism exists, and the struggle against that oppression. The Penguin Book of Feminist Writing is a global anthology of feminist writers, edited and introduced with a major new essay by Hannah Dawson. Beginning in the fifteenth century with Christine de Pizan, who imagined a City of Ladies that would serve as a refuge from the…
In this powerful collection of interviews, Noam Chomsky exposes the problems of our world today, as we stand in this period of monumental change, preparing for a more hopeful tomorrow. 'For the left, elections are a brief interlude in a life of real politics, a moment to ask whether it's worth taking time off to vote . . . Then…
This collection of writings is famous for giving us the phrase 'Freudian slip'. It also builds up a strong social history of Vienna and the middle-class social milieu of Freud and his patients. Through a series of case histories, some no longer than a few lines long, Freud explores how it is that normal people make slips of speech, writing,…
'I've been telling everyone I know about Mary Lawson . . . Each of her novels is just a marvel' Anne Tyler Clara's rebellious older sister is missing. Grief-stricken and bewildered, she yearns to uncover the truth about what happened. Liam, newly divorced and newly unemployed, moves into the house next door and within hours gets a visit from the…
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…
A personal and powerful essay from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the bestselling author of Americanah and Half of a Yellow Sun. ‘I would like to ask that we begin to dream about and plan for a different world. A fairer world. A world of happier men and happier women who are truer to themselves. And this is how to start: we…
