A book to offer clarity and guidance when facing the difficult decision of whether your relationship has a future.Whether we should stay in or leave a relationship is one of the most consequential and painful decisions we are ever likely to confront.What makes the issue so hard is that there are no fixed rules for judgement. How can we tell whether a relationship is 'good enough' or plain wrong? How do we draw the line between justified longing and naivety?...

A guide to modern times that explores the challenges living in the 21st century can pose to our mental wellbeing.The modern world has brought us a range of extraordinary benefits and joys, including technology, medicine, and transport. But it can also feel as though modern times have plunged us ever deeper into greed, despair, and agitation. Seldom has the world felt more privileged and resource-rich yet also worried, blinkered, furious, panicked, and self-absorbed...

**AS HEARD ON THE DIARY OF A CEO PODCAST WITH STEVEN BARTLETTFrom the Sunday Times bestselling author of The School of Life**This is a book about how to optimise your mental health. Written with kindness and sympathy, it is a practical guide to emotional well-being, calm and psychological maturity.Alain de Botton explores how we can cope with a variety of mental challenges, from the mild to the severe. It considers how and why we can get overly anx...

**THE SUNDAY TIMES TOP TEN BESTSELLERFrom one of our great thinkers on modern life and the human condition - an unforgettable story of love and marriage from the author of bestselling novel Essays in Love as well as T**he Consolations of Philosophy, Religion for Atheists and The School of Life'The Course of Love probes the very heart of marriage**, its shifts and squalls, its great adventure, with such forensic tenderness. I laughed a lot...

This book explores ideas around minimalism, simplicity and how to live comfortably with less.The modern world can be a complicated, frenzied, and noisy place, filled with too many options, products, ideas and opinions. That explains why what many of us long for is simplicity: a life that can be more pared down, peaceful, and focused on the essentials.But finding simplicity is not always easy; it isn’t just a case of emptying out our closets or trimming back...

Many of us are quiet geniuses at the art of procrastination. We tend to feel so guilty about everything we haven't done yet (and the hours frittered away as though we were immortal), we never get around to reflecting on why we delay and how we might do so less o en. It seems as if we have procrastinated too much to deserve a new start. Far from it. As this book shows, procrastination isn't a weird affliction we alone have been cursed with: it's a fascinating and solvable design-flaw of the...

A compassionate guide to raising resilient, authentic, well-rounded children.The Good Enough Parent is a compendium of life lessons, including how to say 'No', how to look beneath the surface of "bad" behavior to find the root of what is going on, how to encourage a child to be genuinely kind, and how to handle the moodiness of adolescence.Rather than striving for perfection, the book argues, the job of any parent is in fact to guide a child gently...

A collection of the essential emotional lessons we need in order to thrive.We probably went to school for what felt like a very long time. We probably took care with our homework. Along the way we surely learnt intriguing things about equations, the erosion of glaciers, the history of the Founding Fathers, and the tenses of foreign languages.But why, despite all the lessons we sat through, were we never taught the really important things that dominate and t...

A practical guide to knowing yourself.Socrates summed up all philosophical commandments with one directive: "Know yourself." Self-knowledge informs not only our identity, but how we make decisions in life, work, and love. Society has no shortage of people and organizations offering to guide us to distant places, but very few will help us with the far more important task of traveling around the byways of our own minds. This book takes us on a journey into our deepes...

A fun and engaging book designed to harness and develop children's natural philosophical interest.Children are born philosophers. Without prompting, they often ask questions about time, mortality, happiness and the meaning of life. This book addresses some of their more complex questions by introducing accessible philosophical concepts from 25 famous thinkers, contextualized in relatable everyday scenarios. Presented in an interactive question and answer format, th...

A guide to breaking free from the enduring, and sometimes damaging, behavioral patterns we learned in childhood.As we try to navigate the complexities and anxieties of adulthood, considering our childhoods can feel like a daunting task. They happened so long ago; we can probably barely remember, let alone relate to, the little person we used to be. But one of the most powerful explanations for why we struggle as adults is that we were denied the opportunity to full...

A practical guide to making wiser, more informed choices in love.Finding and choosing a partner is one of the most consequential decisions we will ever make. This guide explains everything from why we have "types" and how our early lives inform our romantic decisions as adults. It sheds light on harmful and repetitive patterns and provides insight on how to break them.Drawing on in-depth analysis, How to Find Love explains our instinct for romantic...