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Social media is supposed to bring us together - but it is tearing us apart. 'A blisteringly good, urgent, essential read' Zadie Smith The evidence suggests that social media is making us sadder, angrier, less empathetic, more fearful, more isolated and more tribal. Jaron Lanier is the world-famous Silicon Valley scientist-pioneer who first alerted us to the dangers of social media. In this witty and urgent manifesto he explains why its toxic effects are at the heart of its design, and, in ten simple arguments, why liberating yourself from its hold will transform your life and the world for the better. WITH A NEW AFTERWORD BY THE AUTHOR 'Informed, heartfelt and often entertaining ... a timely reminder that even if we can't bring ourselves to leave social media altogether, we should always think critically about how it works' Sunday Times 'Indispensable. Everyone who wants to understand the digital world, its pitfalls and possibilities should read this book -...

On a stormy night in 1813, a doctor is called to the aid of two prostitutes in childbirth. To one is born a healthy girl, Henriette, to the other, what can only be described as a monster: a boy, Hercules, deaf-mute and hideously deformed, and with the power to read minds. As he tells the story of Hercules' bizarre and colourful life, which leads him from the bordello of his birth to a travelling freak show and then a Jesuit monastery and an asylum, Vallgren paints a magical picture of nineteenth-century Europe. This picaresque fable is filled with curiosities but is, at its heart, an extraordinary and unforgettable love story. Product details Format Paperback | 288 pages ...

**NOW A MAJOR NETFLIX FILM STARRING TOM HOLLAND AND ROBERT PATTINSON** 'Some people were born just so they could be buried' In Knockemstiff, Ohio, war veteran Willard can't save his beautiful wife, Charlotte, from a slow death by cancer no matter how much sacrificial blood he pours on his 'prayer log'. Carl and Sandy Henderson, a husband-and-wife team of serial killers, trawl America's highways searching for suitable models to photograph and exterminate. Preacher Roy and his crippled virtuoso-guitar-playing sidekick are running from the law. And caught in the middle of all this is Arvin, Willard and Charlotte's orphaned son, looking for answers.... 'Superb' The Times 'Terrifying ... an unsettling masterwork' GQ Product details Format Paperback ...

'Extravagantly beautiful... Enormously, achingly alive... A howl of love and rage, playful and funny as well as hard and bitter' New York Times As young girls, Nel and Sula shared each other's secrets and dreams in the poor black mid-West of their childhood. Then Sula ran away to live her dreams and Nel got married. Ten years later Sula returns and no one, least of all Nel, trusts her. Sula is a story of fear - the fear that traps us, justifying itself through perpetual myth and legend. Cast as a witch by the people who resent her strength, Sula is a woman of uncompromising power, a wayward force who challenges the smallness of a world that tries to hold her down. 'What a force her thoughts have been and how grateful we must be that they were offered to us in this extremely challenging age' Alice Walker, Guardian BY THE NOBEL PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR OF BELOVED Winner of the PEN/Saul Bellow award for achievement in American fiction ...

'Important, necessary, urgent and phenomenally interesting' HELEN MACDONALD, New York Times ONE OF THE SUNDAY TIMES 'BOOKS OF 2021' The author of the international bestseller The Sixth Extinction returns to humanity's transformative impact on the environment, now asking: after doing so much damage, can we change nature, this time to save it? Elizabeth Kolbert has become one of the most important writers on the environment. Now she investigates the immense challenges humanity faces as we scramble to reverse, in a matter of decades, the effects we've had on the atmosphere, the oceans, the world's forests and rivers - on the very topography of the globe. In Under a White Sky, she takes a hard look at the new world we are creating. Along the way, she meets biologists who are trying to preserve the world's rarest fish, which lives in a single tiny pool in the middle of the Mojave desert; engineers who are turning carbon emissions to stone in Iceland; A...

* A Poetry Book Society Recommendation 2016* 'When we climb alone en cordee feminine, we are magicians of the Alps - we make the routes we follow disappear' The poems of Helen Mort's second collection offer an unforgettable perspective on the heights we scale and the distances we run, the routes we follow and the paths we make for ourselves. Here are odes to the women who dared to break new ground - from Miss Jemima Morrell, a young Victorian woman from Yorkshire who hiked the Swiss Peaks in her skirts and petticoats, to the modern British mountaineer Alison Hargreaves, who died descending from the summit of K2. Distinctive and courageous, these are poems of passion and precipices, of edges and extremes. No Map Could Show Them confirms Helen Mort's position as one of the finest young poets at work today. Product details Format ...