Scribe – serie

Learn how to end the self-destructive behaviours that stop you from living your best life with this breakthrough programme.Do you …Put the needs of others above your own?Start to panic when someone you love leaves — or threatens to?Often feel anxious about natural disasters, losing all your money, or getting seriously ill?Find that no matter how successful you are, you still feel unhappy, unfulfilled, or undeserving?Unsatisfactory relationships, an irrational lack of self-esteem, feelings of being unfulfilled — these are all problems that can be solved by changing the types of messages that people internalise. These self-defeating behaviour patterns are called ‘lifetraps’, and Reinventing Your Life shows you how to stop the cycle that keeps you from attaining happiness.Two of America’s leading psychologists, Jeffrey E. Young, PhD, and Janet S. Klosko, PhD, draw on the breakthrough principles of cognitive therapy to help you recognise and change negative thought patterns, without the aid of drugs or long-term traditional therapy. They describe eleven of the most common lifetraps, provide a diagnostic test for each, and offer step-by-step suggestions to help you break free of the traps. Thousands of men and women have seen the immediate and long-term results of the extraordinary programme outlined in this clear, compassionate, liberating book. Its innovative approach to solving ongoing emotional problems will help you create a more fulfilling, productive life.

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2025 INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZEA debut linked story collection of gritty, streetwise, and wickedly funny fiction from Mexico.Life’s a bitch. That’s why you gotta rattle her cage, even if she’s foaming at the mouth.In the linked stories of Reservoir Bitches, thirteen Mexican women prod the bitch that is Life as they fight, sew, skirt, cheat, cry, and lie their way through their tangled circumstances. From the all-powerful daughter of a cartel boss to the victim of transfemicide, from a houseful of spinster seamstresses to a socialite who supports her politician husband by faking Indigenous roots, these women spit on their own reduction and invent new ways to survive, telling their stories in bold, unapologetic voices. At once social critique and black comedy, Reservoir Bitches is a raucous debut from one of Mexico’s most thrilling new writers.

NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2025NPR BEST BOOK OF 2025BOOKLIST BEST BOOK OF 2025A mega bestseller in Sweden — and winner of two of its biggest literary awards — Colony is a gripping portrayal of contemporary society and its alternatives.Burnt-out from a demanding job and a bustling life in the city, Emelie has left town to spend a few days in the country. Once there, in the peaceful, verdant hills, down by the river she encounters a mysterious group of seven people, each with personal stories full of pain, alienation, and the longing to live differently. They are misfits, each in their own way, and all led by the enigmatic and charismatic Sara. How did they end up there? Are they content with the rigid roles they’ve been assigned? And what happens when an outsider appears and is initially drawn to their alternative lifestyle, but cannot help stirring things up?A masterful blend of humour, emotion, unforgettable characters, and sharp social commentary, Colony is a magnetic and deeply touching story about love, community, and the unfathomable power we have over others and that others have over us.

A New York Times bestseller and a Book of the Year for the Evening Standard and The Times.Is getting a little less comfortable the key to living a happier, healthier life?When journalist Scott Carney came across a picture of a man in his fifties sitting on a glacier in just his underwear, he assumed it must be a hoax. Dutch guru Wim Hof claimed he could control his body temperature using his mind and teach others to do the same. Sceptical, Carney signed up to Hof’s one-week course, not realising that it would be the start of a four-year journey to unlock his own evolutionary potential.From hyperventilating in a Polish farmhouse to underwater weight training in California, and eventually climbing Mt Kilimanjaro wearing just shorts and running shoes, Carney travelled the world testing out unorthodox methods of body transformation and discovering the science behind them. In What Doesn’t Kill Us he explains how getting a little less comfortable can help us to unlock our lost evolutionary strength.

World-leading political economist Maja Göpel shows us how we can set the course for the future in times of upheaval, and why this concerns us all. The way we live is changing fundamentally. The status quo is crumbling, but there is still reason to hope. Drawing on the latest scientific research, Maja Göpel distils complex developments across the environment, the economy, politics, society, and technology, and reveals how we can use this knowledge for a better world.Great transformations in history were triggered by humans, and our window to the future is as open as never before. It is time that we — each of us individually, but also society as a whole — allowed ourselves to think anew, to dream, and to ask a radical question: who do we want to be?After her previous book, Rethinking Our World, eloquently untangled the chaotic world we live in, Maja Göpel now gives readers the tools and motivation needed to build the world we want to live in.

A revealing memoir about living with Asperger’s syndrome that is by turns laugh-out-loud funny and achingly sad.It is only when he is diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, at the age of 55, that Tom Cutler’s life starts to make sense — his accidental rudeness, his strange obsessions (including road signs and Sherlock Holmes), his unusual way of dressing, and his trouble in company. In this moving memoir, Tom explores his eccentric behaviour from boyhood to manhood, examines the role of autism in his family, and investigates the scientific explanations for his condition. Eloquent, witty, and insightful, Keep Clear ultimately shows why the day Tom received his diagnosis turned out to be the happiest day of his life.

Better sex in ten steps: renowned sex therapist and bestselling author Ian Kerner shares the program he uses to help thousands of couples achieve more intimacy and enjoyment. Think about the last time you had sex. Who initiated it? When and where did it happen? What was off-limits and why? Did you lose yourself in pleasure and connection, or did you come away feeling disappointed, or even ashamed?In this book, Kerner shows you how to create a sex life that works for you. He helps you figure out what’s working, what’s not, where you might be missing some elements, and how to construct a sex life that is mutually satisfying. He also discusses many common sexual problems — such as low desire, issues with climaxing, and erectile unpredictability — and how to resolve them. Drawing on the latest research and informed by his own experience of overcoming sexual problems, he lays out an easy-to-follow step-by-step process that has transformed the lives of his many clients, and can do the same for you.

Collected and annotated lyrics from one of music’s most visionary bards, John Darnielle.A work of rapturous beauty, This Year: 365 Songs Annotated celebrates the creative life and the musical genius of John Darnielle through his most meaningful songs.From his early days recording on a boom box, through the evolution of the Mountain Goats from a solo project to a full band, to his continued influence on indie music, This Year pairs the definitive texts of 365 John Darnielle songs with first-person commentaries on his life and music. These commentaries reveal how the songs came to be and the people who inspired them: his family and friends; his wife, Lalitree Darnielle; his longtime collaborator, Peter Hughes; and even his literary heroes, among many others. Here are the origins of ‘This Year’, ‘No Children’, ‘The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton’, and ‘Up the Wolves’, as well as Darnielle’s literary influences, including Flannery O’Connor, Jorge Luis Borges, and Stephen King.This Year, spanning decades, becomes the definitive literary record of one of the greatest songwriters and musical creative forces of all time.

WINNER OF THE JANN MEDLICOTT ACORN PRIZE FOR FICTIONWINNER OF THE MITOQ BEST FIRST BOOK OF FICTIONWINNER OF THE NGAIO MARSH AWARD FOR BEST CRIME NOVELauē(verb) to cry, howl, groan, wail, bawl.(interjection) expression of astonishment or distress.Taukiri was born into sorrow. Auē can be heard in the sound of the sea he loves and hates, and in the music he draws out of the guitar that was his father’s. It spills out of the gang violence that killed his father and sent his mother into hiding, and the shame he feels about abandoning his eight-year-old brother to a violent home.But Taukiri’s brother, Ārama, is braver than he looks, and he has a friend, and his friend has a dog, and the three of them together might just be strong enough to turn back the tide of sadness.This bestselling multi-award-winning novel is both raw and sublime, introducing a compelling new voice in New Zealand fiction.

‘A devastating portrait of the cultures and logics underlying big tech. Rushkoff is going to make you mad enough to fight back. A vital, lucid, and enraging read.’ Naomi Klein, author of This Changes EverythingThe tech elite have a plan to survive the apocalypse: they want to leave us all behind. When Douglas Rushkoff was summoned to the desert to a private talk for the rich and powerful, he learned about ‘The Mindset’: a theory that inevitable societal catastrophe can be evaded by individuals with enough money and the right technology. Here, Rushkoff traces the evolution of The Mindset through its origins in science and technology to its current expression in missions to Mars, island bunkers, and the Metaverse. This mind-blowing work of social analysis shows us how to transcend the landscape The Mindset has created — a world alive with algorithms and intelligences actively rewarding our most selfish tendencies — and rediscover community, mutual aid, and human interdependency.

An extraordinary story about a Jewish woman who pretended to be Catholic to survive the Holocaust.Catholics believed she was one of them. A devoted Nazi family took her in. She fell in love with a German engineer who built aeroplanes for the Luftwaffe. But no one knew that Mala Rivka Kizel had been born into a large Orthodox Jewish family. She survived World War II using her charm, intelligence, blonde hair, and blue eyes to assume different identities.Journalist Pieter van Os retraces Mala’s footsteps through Europe to uncover her extraordinary journey and the stories of those who helped her. This poignant, rich book is an engrossing meditation on what drives us to fear the Other, and what in turn might allow us to feel compassion for them.

A moving portrayal of a troubled mother–daughter relationship, shortlisted for Japan’s prestigious Akutagawa Prize. In 2008, the unnamed narrator of Gifted is working as a hostess and living in Tokyo’s nightlife district. One day, her estranged mother, who is seriously ill, suddenly turns up at her door.As the mother approaches the end of her life, the two women must navigate their strained relationship, while the narrator also reckons with events happening in her own life, including the death of a close friend — all under the bright lights of Tokyo‘s ‘sleepless town’, Kabukicho.In sharp, elegant prose, and based on the author’s own experiences as a sex worker, Gifted heralds the breakthrough of an exciting new literary talent.

Could you marry a man you’ve never met? Three Korean women in 1918 make a life-changing journey to Hawaii, where they will marry, having seen only photographs of their intended husbands.Different fates await each of these women. Hong-ju, who dreams of a marriage of ‘natural love’, meets a man who looks twenty years older than his photograph; Song-hwa, who wants to escape from her life of ridicule as the granddaughter of a shaman, meets a lazy drunkard. And then there’s Willow, whose 26-year-old groom, Taewan, looks just like his image …Real life doesn’t always resemble a picture, but there’s no going back. And while things don’t turn out quite as they’d hoped, even for Willow, they do find something that makes their journey worthwhile — each other.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2017 VICTORIAN PREMIER'S LITERARY AWARD FOR FICTIONA schoolgirl catches the eye of the future leader of Nazi Germany. An aspiring playwright writes to a convicted serial killer, seeking inspiration. A pair of childhood sweethearts reunite to commit rape and murder. A devoted Mormon wife follows her husband into the wilderness after he declares himself a prophet. The twelve stories in The Love of a Bad Man imagine the lives of real women, all of whom were the lovers, wives, or mistresses of various ‘bad’ men in history. Beautifully observed, fascinating, and at times horrifying, the stories interrogate power, the nature of obsession, and the lengths some women will go to for the men they love.PRAISE FOR LAURA ELIZABETH WOOLLETT‘Like Helen Garner, Laura Woollett is impelled to explore the darkest corners of the human heart, the savage cognitive distortions of love; to understand and empathise with the monstrous, rather than to instinctively recoil or judge … Woollett's pitch-perfect command of narrative voice, period, and psychology creates 12 tales to fascinate and unnerve.’ The Age‘The Love of a Bad Man imagines the inner lives of historical figures who committed crimes all in the name of love … The stories treat death with a gothic inevitability and explore human darkness with a light touch.’ The Guardian

Winner of the CWA Gold Dagger for Non-Fiction.A letter arrives. You’ve got an appointment with a trainee clinical psychologist on April 29, 2008.You don’t attend.Another letter arrives. It says they don’t normally reschedule appointments, but they know this is hard for you, so they’re offering you another appointment. It’s on May 13, 2008.You don’t attend.Two years later you shoot three people and shoot yourself. You will be called a monster. You will be called evil. The prime minister, David Cameron, will stand up in Parliament and say you were a callous murderer, end of story. You have nine days and your whole life to prove you are more than a callous murderer.Go.Raoul Moat became notorious one hot July week when, after killing his ex-girlfriend’s new boyfriend, shooting her in the stomach, and blinding a policeman, he disappeared into the woods of Northumberland, evading discovery for seven days. Eventually, cornered by the police, Moat shot himself. Here, Andrew Hankinson re-tells Moat's story using Moat’s words, and those of the state services which engaged with him, bringing the reader disarmingly close, at all times, to the mind of Moat.

Winner of the German Book Prize, from the winner of the 2023 Georg Büchner Prize. It is 1989, and a young literature student named Ed travels to the Baltic island of Hiddensee, a notorious destination for hippies, idealists, and those at odds with the East German state. On Hiddensee, Ed joins the community of seasonal workers, led by the charismatic, enigmatic Kruso. At night, they secretly help the refugees who have come to the island seeking passage to the West. But Kruso is preoccupied by another kind of freedom — freedom of the mind.As the wave of history washes over the German Democratic Republic, the friends’ grip on reality loosens and life on the island will never be the same.

Find the happiness of emptiness.Few things scare us more than inner emptiness. The presumed emptiness of coma or dementia scares us so much that we even sign living wills to avoid these states. Yet as Zen masters have long known, inner emptiness can also be productive and useful. We can reach this state through meditation, concentration, music, or even during sex. In fact, our brain loves emptiness — it makes us happy.Leading brain researcher Niels Birbaumer investigates the pleasure in emptiness and how we can take advantage of it. He explains how to overcome the evolutionary attentiveness of your brain and take a break from thinking — a skill that’s more important than ever in an increasingly frantic world.

Spring and summer are my mother’s time, autumn and winter are my husband’s. What is left for me?Persephone spends six months of the year under the ground with her husband, king of the dead, and six months on earth with her mother, goddess of the harvest. It has been this way for nine thousand years, since the deal was struck. But when she resurfaces this spring, something is different. Rains lash the land, crops grow out of season or not at all, there are people trying to build a road through the woods, and her mother does not seem able to stop them. The natural world is changing rapidly and even the gods have lost control.While Demeter tries to regain her powers and fend off her daughter’s husband, who wants to drag his queen back underground for good, Persephone finally gets a taste of freedom, joining a group of protestors. Used to blinking up at the world from below, as she looks down on the earth for the very first time from the treetops with activist Snow, Persephone realises that there are choices she can make for herself. But what will these choices mean for her mother, her husband, and for the new shoots of life inside her?No Season but the Summer takes a classic myth and turns it on its head, asking what will happen when our oldest stories fail us, when all the rules have changed. It is, above all, a book about choice.

A Metro book of the yearInterweaving the social, political, and personal, in 1947 Elisabeth Åsbrink chronicles the year that ‘now’ began.In 1947, production begins of the Kalashnikov, Christian Dior creates the New Look, Simone de Beauvoir writes The Second Sex, the CIA is set up, a clockmaker’s son draws up the plan that remains the goal of jihadists to this day, and a UN Committee is given four months to find a solution to the problem of Palestine.In 1947, millions of refugees flee across Europe looking for new homes, among them Elisabeth Åsbrink’s father.In 1947, the forces that will go on to govern all our lives during the next 70 years first make themselves known.

A Nobel Peace Prize-winner outlines his radical economic vision for a better future.Muhammad Yunus is the economist who invented microcredit, founded Grameen Bank, and earned a Nobel Peace Prize for his work towards alleviating poverty. Here, he proposes his vision for a new kind of capitalism, where altruism and generosity are valued as much as profit making, and where individuals not only have the capacity to lift themselves out of poverty, but also to affect real change for the planet and its people.A World of Three Zeroes offers a challenge to young people, business and political leaders, and ordinary citizens everywhere to improve the world for everyone before it’s too late.

Ever since Darwin, science has enshrined competition as biology’s brutal architect. But this revelatory new book argues that our narrow view of evolution has caused us to ignore the generosity and cooperation that exist around us, from the soil to the sky.In Sweet in Tooth and Claw, Kristin Ohlson explores the subtle ways in which nature is in constant collaboration to the betterment of all species. From the bear that discards the remainders of his salmon dinner on the forest ground, to the bright coral reefs of Cuba, she shows readers not only the connectivity lying beneath the surface in natural ecosystems, but why it’s vital for humans to incorporate that understanding into our interactions with nature, and also with each other.Much of the damage that humans have done to our natural environment stems from our ignorance of these dense webs of connection. As we struggle to cope with the environmental hazards that our behaviour has unleashed, it’s more important than ever to understand nature’s billions of cooperative interactions. This way, we can stop disrupting them and instead rely on them to renew ecosystems.In reporting from the frontlines of scientific research, regenerative agriculture, and urban conservation, Ohlson shows that a shift from focusing on competition to collaboration can heal not only our relationships with the natural world, but also with each other.

Why do diets fail? Is it because of genetic disposition? A sluggish metabolism? An underactive thyroid? A behavioural psychologist reveals the truth about dieting, including how she lost over 100lb in one year. After years of failed diets Dr Nadja Hermann weighed over 23 stone at the age of 30. All her life, she had heard and read about hundreds of reasons why diets wouldn't work for her. But when her weight started to seriously affect her health, she took a hard look at the science and realised that most of what she believed about dieting was a myth. What was more, those very myths were preventing her from losing weight.Forget clean eating, paleo, or fasting — it was conquering these elements of ‘Fat Logic’ that finally led to Hermann achieving a healthy weight. One and a half years later, she weighed 10 stone, and has maintained that weight to this day. Now, using humour, the insight she’s acquired, and a dose of science, Hermann debunks widespread lies about weight loss, and shows how it is possible to attain a healthy weight.

One woman’s journey to overcome grief by delving into nature.After losing her husband of 32 years, Long Litt Woon is utterly bereft. For a time, she is disoriented, aimless, lost. It is only when she wanders deep into the woods and attunes herself to Nature’s chorus that she learns how the wild might restore us to hope, and to life after death.

Drug-resistant bacteria — known as superbugs — are one of the biggest medical threats of our time. Here, a doctor, researcher, and ethics professor tells the exhilarating story of his race to beat them and save countless lives.When doctor Matt McCarthy first meets Jackson, a mechanic from Queens, it is in the ER, where he has come for treatment for an infected gunshot wound. Usually, antibiotics would be prescribed, but Jackson’s infection is one of a growing number of superbugs, bacteria that have built up resistance to known drugs. He only has one option, and if that doesn’t work he may lose his leg or even his life.On the same day, McCarthy and his mentor Tom Walsh begin work on a groundbreaking clinical trial for a new antibiotic they believe will eradicate certain kinds of superbugs and demonstrate to Big Pharma that investment in these drugs can save millions of lives and prove financially viable. But there are seemingly endless hoops to jump through before they can begin administering the drug to patients, and for people like Jackson time is in short supply.Superbugs is a compelling tale of medical ingenuity. From the muddy trenches of the First World War, where Alexander Fleming searched for a cure for soldiers with infected wounds, to breakthroughs in antibiotics and antifungals today that could revolutionise how infections are treated, McCarthy takes the reader on a roller-coaster ride through the history — and future — of medicine. Along the way, we meet patients like Remy, a teenage girl with a dangerous and rare infection; Donny, a retired firefighter with a compromised immune system; and Bill, the author’s own father-in-law, who contracts a deadly staph infection. And we learn about the ethics of medical research: why potentially life-saving treatments are often delayed for years to protect patients from exploitation.Can McCarthy get his trial approved and underway in time to save the lives of his countless patients infected with deadly bacteria, who have otherwise lost all hope?

An unputdownable tale of one man’s quest to recover his family’s property, plundered by the Nazis.Menachem Kaiser’s brilliantly told story is set in motion when the author takes up his Holocaust-survivor grandfather’s former battle to reclaim the family’s property in Sosnowiec, Poland. Here, he meets a Polish lawyer known as ‘The Killer’ who agrees to take his case and becomes involved with a band of Silesian treasure-seekers, all the while piecing together his family’s complex history.Propelled by rich, original research, Kaiser immerses readers in profound questions that reach far beyond his personal quest. What does it mean to seize your own legacy? Can reclaimed property repair rifts among the living?Plunder is both a deeply immersive adventure story and an irreverent, daring interrogation of inheritance — material, spiritual, familial, and emotional.

A powerful new book that gives flustered parents the exact words to use in any situation.A toddler meltdown over the wrong pair of trousers, siblings fighting in the back of the car, constant struggles just to leave the house … Parents have the best intentions to be patient and loving, but in the heat of the moment they often find themselves feeling helpless, desperate, and so frustrated that they resort to shouting, threatening, bribing, or caving. Now Say This solves the dilemma of how to be empathic and effective at once.Based on their popular 3-step ‘ALP’ model — Attune, Limit Set, Problem Solve — which the authors have taught to thousands of parents in their clinical practice, Now Say This addresses issues such as:tantrumssibling relationshipsscreen timebedtimeBest of all, it answers the question ‘Now, what do you actually say?’ using scripts and body-language tips from real-life examples. User-friendly and research based, Now Say This transforms remarkable ideas into practical how-tos that busy parents can use right away.

The thrilling new novel, inspired by the events at Jonestown in the 1970s.It’s the summer of 1968, and Evelyn Lynden is a woman at war with herself. Minister’s daughter. Atheist. Independent woman. Frustrated wife. Bitch with a bleeding heart.Following her conscientious-objector husband Lenny to the rural Eden of Evergreen Valley, California, Evelyn wants to be happy with their new life. Yet she finds herself disillusioned with Lenny’s passive ways — and anxious for a saviour. Enter the Reverend Jim Jones, the dynamic leader of a new revolutionary church … Meticulously researched and masterfully written, Beautiful Revolutionary explores the allure of the real-life charismatic leader who would destroy so many. It follows Evelyn as she is pulled into Jones’s orbit — an orbit it would prove impossible for her to leave.

Death. Sex. Money. Tricky subjects we’re taught to avoid in polite conversation. Here, the host of a hit podcast reveals how to talk about difficult things, and why it might be the most important thing we do.In Let’s Talk About Hard Things, Sale takes her quest for more honest communication into her own life. She considers her history of facing (and sometimes avoiding) difficult subjects; she reflects on race, wealth, inequality, love, grief, death, power — all the things that shape our daily lives, the things we should be talking about, but often struggle to. Through the personal stories of people whose lives have been transformed by tough conversations, we discover new ways of approaching these tricky topics with family, friends, loved ones, and strangers.Let’s Talk About Hard Things is candid, unflinching, and entertaining in its quest to make everyone more comfortable with the uncomfortable realities of life.

From the acclaimed author of Listen, Liberal and What’s the Matter with Kansas, a scathing collection of interlocking essays perfect for this political moment.With his trademark sardonic wit and lacerating logic, New York Times–bestselling author Thomas Frank takes us on a tour through present-day America, showing us a society in the late stages of disintegration.Holding nothing back, Frank skewers both the right and left, and rages about the systematic inequality that led, in 2016, to millions of anxious, ordinary people rallying to the presidential campaign of a billionaire who meant them no good.For those who despair of the future of America and of reason itself, Rendezvous with Oblivion is a booster shot of energy, reality, and moral outrage.