HarperNorth – serie

‘An urgent manifesto for collective healing.’ David Lammy MP This landmark book tackles a deceptively simple idea: the more we spend time with people unlike ourselves, doing things together, the more understanding, tolerant, and even friendly we become.Combining fresh analysis with a wealth of fascinating examples, Jon Yates demonstrates the ways in which our societies have become disconnected, so that most of us spend less and less time with people who are different — as defined by age, race, or class, earning power or education.By answering a series of surprising questions, Yates reveals a set of truths that will change the way you think about yourself and those around you. What unites the England football team, the iPod and Singapore? How did a city that funded its schools the least become the best place to grow up poor? How did Silicon Valley come from nowhere to dominate the tech industry? How did a village of Italian-Americans become incredibly healthy while smoking cigars, drinking red wine and never exercising? And why is talking to our friends about politics the worst thing we can do for our democracy?Fractured is ultimately an optimistic book, showing convincingly how great people are when they're united in diversity. It argues that the pandemic has created an unprecedented opportunity for us to come together. So we must forge a new ‘Common Life’ – a set of shared practises and institutions — that can strengthen the glue that bonds our societies, in all their diversity.For the health of our democracy, our society, and our economy, the time to act is now.

The remarkable wartime diary of nurse Kathleen Johnstone ‘Warm, chatty and endlessly absorbing, this delightful diary brims with intelligence and humour.’ Wendy Moore, author of Endell Street: The Women Who Ran Britain’s Trailblazing Military Hospital The second world war could not have been won without the bravery and selflessness of women on the Home Front. Women like Kathleen Johnstone.This first-hand story of one extraordinary but unheralded member of Britain’s ‘Greatest Generation’ brings home with extraordinary lucidity and compassion the realities of wartime Lancashire.In 1943, Kathleen, then thirty, was a nurse-in-training at the Blackburn Royal Infirmary. For the next three years she kept a meticulous diary of her day-to-day existence, leaving behind a vivid record of the real-time concerns of a busy, thoughtful woman on the frontline of the war at home.Kathleen’s days were never the same. She writes in clear and lively prose about life in the hospital: of her fellow nurses, her patients, about death and dying, and the progress of the war as wounded soldiers returned from Normandy in the summer of 1944. She muses on being working class, wartime austerity, and her anxiety about examinations. Here too are dances, Americans and a POW boyfriend in Germany. Kathleen’s observations are witty, wry and astute – but above all relatable, even today.Poignant and engrossing, Kathleen Johnstone’s tale of trauma, romance and friendship will leave a lasting impression.