To inherit a great fortune. To inherit a great misfortune.’ These words, from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s notebook, neatly encapsulate the theme of The House of the Seven Gables that of a family whose fortunes are poisoned by its past misdeeds. The sins of the Pyncheon father are visited upon his children over a period of several generations, until such time as one of his descendants unites with a member of the family he has wronged. Love conquers hate, and new blood washes away the original cri...

Trees are our constant companions. They stand tall above us, shading us from the sun. They breathe in and out, feeding us oxygen. They weather the storms, protecting us from danger. As children we intuitively understand the impact trees have on our lives. We sit beneath their branches, we collect their fallen leaves, we hug their trunks in thanks. But in the process of growing up, we forget these gentle giants. We move to cities, we commute through concrete jungles and we...

The unabridged, downloadable audiobook edition of David Shields highly persuasive Reality Hunger: A Manifesto. Read by the actor Peter Marinker.Reality Hunger is a manifesto for a burgeoning group of interrelated but unconnected artists who, living in an unbearably artificial world, are breaking ever larger chunks of 'reality' into their work. The questions Shields explores - the bending of form and genre, the lure and blur of the real - play out constantly around...

**SUNDAY TIMES BESTELLER**This book is about learning to live.Echoing Socrates' statement that the unexamined life not worth living, psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz draws on his twenty-five years of work and more than 50,000 hours of conversations to form a collection of beautifully rendered tales that illuminate the human experience.These are stories about everyday lives: from a woman who finds herself daydreaming as she retur...

The unabridged, downloadable audiobook edition of David Shields 2008 New York Times Bestseller, The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead, read by the actor Peter Marinker.Mesmerized and somewhat unnerved by his 97-year-old father's vitality and optimism, David Shields undertakes an original investigation of our flesh-and-blood existence, our mortal being.Weaving together personal anecdote, biological fact, philosophical doubt, cultural criticism, and the ...

At Christmas 1975 a group of Californian students experiment with LSD. One of them, Michael Quinn kidnaps the son of an English professor. When he is released from jail twenty years later, a mysterious young English woman named Joni Lascelles begins to ask questions that will unravel the past...

For years legendary broadcaster Alistair Cooke brought America to the rest of the world with incomparable wit and wisdom. This is his classic "personal history" of America, guiding us through centuries of changing life in the USA. Beginning with his own arrival in America as a graduate in the 1930s, Alistair Cooke discusses the explorers who put their new-found land on the map, the pioneers who tamed the Wild West, the soldiers who fought for independence and the tycoons who built fortunes...

1865: The American Civil War is ending. Eighteen years after the famine ship ‘Star of the Sea’ docked at New York, the daughter of two of its passengers sets out from Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Eliza Duane Mooney is searching for her younger brother who she has not seen in four years. It's a walk that will have consequences for many…

Our ability to make choices is fundamental to our sense of ourselves as human beings, and essential to the political values of freedom-protecting nations. Whom we love; where we work; how we spend our time; what we buy; such choices define us in the eyes of ourselves and others, and much blood and ink has been spilt to establish and protect our rights to make them freely. Choice can also be a burden. Our cognitive capacity to research and make the best decisions is limited, so every active...

In the bitter winter of 1847, from an Ireland torn by injustice and natural disaster, the Star of the Sea sets sail for New York. On board are hundreds of fleeing refugees, all braving the Atlantic in search of a new home. But a camouflaged killer is stalking the decks, hungry for the vengeance that will bring absolution. The twenty-six day journey will see many lives end, whilst others begin afresh…

Since America's founding, the U.S. Supreme Court had issued a vast number of decisions on a staggeringly wide variety of subjects. And hundreds of judges have occupied the bench. Yet as Cass R. Sunstein, the eminent legal scholar and bestselling co-author of Nudge, points out, almost every one of the Justices fits into a very small number of types regardless of ideology: the hero, the soldier, the minimalist, and the mute. Heroes are willing to invoke the Constitution to invalidate state l...

The different ways that social change happens, from unleashing to nudging to social cascades. How does social change happen? When do social movements take off? Sexual harassment was once something that women had to endure; now a movement has risen up against it. White nationalist sentiments, on the other hand, were largely kept out of mainstream discourse; now there is no shortage of media outlets for them. In this book, with the help of behavioral economics, psychology, and other fields, ...