Poignant, whimsical, funny, this chronicle describes what it feels like to be looking for love in your sixties, through The Sunday Times ads, when you look back at your past experiences and wonder: could I live up to a new challenge? Would I make the same mistakes? Could I be happy with a man at last?Whatever our age, we want to share, talk, laugh with someone; we need touch, sex, closeness; and we also need a witness: we have so much to give still, and balk at the prospect of the r...

How does it feel when, in the middle of your life, you come to the shattering realisation that you and your younger sister were sexually abused as young girls?How, having endured years of tragedy as a consequence, do you come to terms with uncovering a trauma that had confused and disempowered you?And what is the effect on a woman trying to make her way in the world when so much of what it means to be a woman has been taken away?One writer's unflinching struggle to mak...

Professor Stephen Hawking is one of the most famous and remarkable scientists of our age and author of the scientific bestseller "A Brief History of Time", which sold over 25 million copies across the world and will be adapted as a children's book in the Autumn of next year. In this compelling memoir his first wife, Jane Hawking, relates the inside story of their extraordinary marriage. As Stephen's academic renown soared, his body was collapsing under the assaults of motor neurone disease...

Just thirty, with a well-paid job, depression and no love life, the narrator and anti-hero par excellence of this grim, funny and clever novel smokes four packs of cigarettes a day and writes weird animal stories in his spare time. A computer programmer by day, he is tolerably content, until, that is, he's packed off with a colleague - the unimaginably ugly, sexually-frustrated virgin Raphael Tisserand - to train provincial civil servants in the use of a new computer system... A painfully ...

Australia's bravest and most honest writer explores the devastating aftermath of her elderly mother's decision to end her own life.Nikki Gemmell's world changed forever in October 2015 when the body of her elderly mother was found and it became clear she had decided to end her own life. After the immediate shock and devastation came the guilt and the horror, for Nikki, her family, relatives and friends. No note was left, so the questions that Elayn's death raised were endless. Was t...

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...

**WINNER OF THE 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATUREA New York Times Notable Book**"A deeply affecting account of mothers and daughters, youth and age, and dreams and reality" (Kirkus Reviews)Upon her mother’s death from Alzheimer’s, Ernaux embarks on a daunting journey back through time, as she seeks to "capture the real woman, the one who existed independently from me, born on the outskirts of a small Normandy town, and who died in the geriatri...

A guide to living a more joyful and interesting life.In pursuit of a more exciting life, we often seek external experiences to fulfill us. We take trips, parachute out of airplanes, and buy the latest technology. But the keys to a more joyful, thrilling, and beautiful life are already within us.This inspiring book from The School of Life is a guide to the psychology of fulfillment. It presents readers with a chance to accept our desires and aspirations, nur...

What is it that makes us who we are? In this beautifully written and searingly honest autobiography, the intrepid cyclist and traveller Dervla Murphy remembers her richly unconventional first thirty years. She describes her determined childhood self - strong-willed and beguiled by books from the first - her intermittent formal education and the intense relationship of an only child with her parents, particularly her invalid mother whom she nursed until her death. Here lie the roots of Derv...

Middle age took Jane Shilling by surprise. She hadn't seen it coming, and she certainly wasn't ready for it. Living a flawed, bittersweet version of the idyll she dreamed of in her twenties, in a tumbledown urban cottage by the Thames, with a son, a cat and a horse in a livery fifty miles away, she wondered whether middle age was the beginning of the end. Or was there one last great adventure to be had?The Stranger in the Mirror is one woman's attempt to understand what mi...

'Searingly honest... gripping... fascinating and hugely entertaining.'- Sunday Times**'Moving and frank ... A story of a childhood defined by loneliness, the absence of a father and the grim experience of a Quaker boarding school. It is also one of the most perceptive accounts of Britain in the 1970s.'- Misha Glenny'A crisp, unself-pitying memoir of a 'trainwreck' youth ... I've always likes Webb on the radio. But...

The international sensation that sold half a million copies in France and the subject of a new film by Roman Polanski: a chilling story about a friendship gone terrifyingly toxic.Winner of Le Prix Renaudot 2015Winner of Le Prix Goncourt des Lycéens 2015Overwhelmed by the huge success of her latest novel, exhausted and suffering from a crippling inability to write, Delphine meets L., who embodies everything Delphine h...