Psychology & Sociology

In our increasingly polarised society, having productive discussions about social justice issues has never been more challenging, or more crucial. From the persistent ('not all men,' 'I don't see colour') to the insidious ('to play devil's advocate...', 'climate change is coming'), too often, antagonistic or problematic responses threaten to distract and derail our most urgent conversations. Tackling twenty of the most enduring conversation-stoppers, No Offence, But... equips readers with the knowledge, tools and context to respond with confidence.

Alongside other trailblazing writers, educators and advocates, acclaimed campaigner Gina Martin helps us to unpick these phrases, understand why they are harmful and feel empowered to change the conversation. Featuring chapters from Aja Barber, Ben Hurst, Cathy Reay, Charlie Craggs, Daze Aghaji, Ione Gamble, Koa Beck, Mariam Kemple Hardy and Azadeh Hosseini, Nova Reid and Salma El-Wardany.

Five Minute Therapy is an guide that makes being the best version of yourself quick and easy. From psychotherapist Sarah Crosby, aka Instagram sensation @themindgeek. This guide will show you how to destress, become more confident and learn - and unlearn - who you are. With concise yet powerful insight, inspirational encouragement and quick exercises, this book is your pocket therapist.

A useful look at some diverse scientific advice that can help you change your life in under a minute, and guides you toward becoming more decisive, more imaginative, more engaged, and altogether more happy.

Michael Barber has spent many years advising governments, businesses and major sporting teams around the world on how to achieve ambitious goals on time. In this book he applies the wisdom he has gained from dealing with large, complex organizations and elite athletes to help anyone tackle their most challenging goals. Drawing on the stories of historic visionaries and modern heroes - from Galileo to Rosa Parks, Harold Macmillan to Paula Radcliffe - Barber uses personal anecdote and proven strategy to map the route to success and navigate the difficulties that arise along the way. Whatever it is that you aspire to do - run a marathon, transform a school or provide a business of public service to millions - this book will inspire you to get going and to bridge the gap between hope and reality.

This is Martin Spinelli's inspiring story of finding purpose in his life after the tragic death of his wife in a car crash, and the story of his son's miraculous recovery.

We are surrounded by death. It is in our news, our nursery rhymes, our true-crime podcasts. Yet from a young age, we are told that death is something to be feared. Fuelled by a childhood fascination with death, journalist Hayley Campbell searches for answers in the people who make a living by working with the dead.

Along the way, she encounters mass fatality investigators, embalmers, and a former executioner who is responsible for ending 62 lives. She meets gravediggers who have already dug their own graves, visits a cryonics facility in Michigan, goes for late-night Chinese with a detective, and questions a man whose job it is to make crime scenes disappear. Through Campbell's incisive and candid interviews with these people who see death every day, she asks: are we missing something vital by letting death remain hidden? 

The average adult spends about a third of his or her waking time alone. Yet research suggests we aren't very good at using, never mind enjoying, alone time. Rising to the challenge, travel writer Stephanie Rosenbloom explores the joys and benefits of being alone in four mouth-watering journeys to the cities of Paris, Istanbul, Florence and New York, in four seasons.

As a retired brain surgeon, Henry Marsh thought he understood illness, but he was unprepared for the impact of his diagnosis of advanced cancer. And Finally explores what happens when someone who has spent a lifetime on the frontline of life and death finds himself contemplating what might be his own death sentence. As he navigates the bewildering transition from doctor to patient, he is haunted by past failures and projects yet to be completed, and frustrated by the inconveniences of illness and old age. But he is also more entranced than ever by the mysteries of science and the brain, the beauty of the natural world and his love for his family. Elegiac, candid, luminous and poignant, And Finally is ultimately not so much a book about death, but a book about life and what matters in the end.

Who are the English? Today, the dominant story told about our national history solely serves the interests of the right. The only people who dare speak of 'Englishness' are cheerleaders for isolationism and imperial nostalgia.

But there is another story, equally compelling, about who we are: about the English people's radical inclusivity, their ancient commitment to the natural world, their long struggle to win rights for all. It puts the Chartists and the Levellers in their rightful places alongside Nelson and Churchill. It draws on the medieval writers and Romantic poets who emphasised the sanctity of the environment. And at its heart is England's ancient multicultural heritage, embodied by the Black and Asian writers the curriculum neglects.

Here, Caroline Lucas uses this alternative story to offer a progressive vision of what Englishness is and what it might be. 

To understand business, you need to think like an anthropologist. Is your workplace riven by tribal conflict? Are your meetings governed by dozens of unspoken rituals? Is there something faintly religious about the way your colleagues worship the CEO? If so, then you might need a lesson in business anthropology. For a century, anthropologists have had an unusual method: immersing themselves deep inside 'alien' tribes and uncovering, from the inside, how they tick. Today, a new generation of anthropologists are using this approach to explain modern businesses - revealing the hidden rituals that define what we buy, who we sell to, and how we work. 

Now, bestselling author Gillian Tett reveals how this new wave of anthropology can help make sense of your business. She shows how thinking like an anthropologist can help you navigate a globalised economy, allowing you to get inside the heads of consumers on the other side of the world. And she argues that anthropology can explain your own workplace, too: by revealing why, say, your IT team seem to have such different priorities to you - or how to alter the behavioural patterns of your most perplexing colleagues. Along the way, Tett draws on extraordinary stories from Tajik villages and Amazon warehouses, Japanese classrooms and Wall Street trading floors - all to reveal how you too can think like an anthropologist. The result is a revelatory new way to view global business. In a short-sighted world, we can all learn to see clearly - using the power of Anthro-Vision.

The Anthropocene is the current geological age, in which human activity has profoundly shaped the planet and its biodiversity. In this remarkable symphony of essays adapted and expanded from his groundbreaking podcast, John Green reviews different facets of the human-centered planet - from the QWERTY keyboard and Staphylococcus aureus to the Taco Bell breakfast menu - on a five-star scale.

Complex and rich with detail, the Anthropocene's reviews have been praised as 'observations that double as exercises in memoiristic empathy.' John Green's gift for storytelling shines throughout this artfully curated collection that includes both beloved essays and all-new pieces exclusive to the book.

Is our search for happiness futile? Or are we just going about it the wrong way? Oliver Burkeman argues that there is, in fact, an alternative path to contentment and success that involves embracing the things we spend our lives trying to avoid - uncertainty, insecurity, pessimism and failure.

Do you constantly talk with your friends about your partner and your relationship? If your partner doesn't answer a text quickly, do you become anxious? Or do you check up on your partner online to know about their every move?

If so, you might identify with having an anxious attachment style and find yourself more prone to insecurity, jealousy and co-dependency. But there is plenty you can do to feel stronger and more secure within yourself and improve the quality of your relationships.

Expert psychotherapist and couples' counsellor Jessica Baum has over ten years' experience helping her clients discover the mutually supportive relationships they deserve. In Anxiously Attached, she shares the groundbreaking research and practical tools you need to understand your core attachment patterns and form healthier and more fulfilling relationships.

In this book you will learn how to:
- Create boundaries to safeguard your sense of self in relationships
- Communicate to your partners what you need to feel safe and secure in the relationship
- Develop a secure sense of self-worth and emotional stability

Full of psychological insight, useful exercises and real-life case studies of people who learned how to connect on a deeper and more secure level, Anxiously Attached is an essential roadmap to finding and sustaining love.

'The coaching room can sometimes become its own theatre. A marriage unravels right in front of you. A shaming confession is made. A secret hugged for many years is disclosed. Tears of wrenching anger and despair can take up the whole session. These are times where you and the client hold your breath because nothing is ever going to be the same again.' 

It is very rare as an adult to find a place where you are not judged, where you can be open, honest and vulnerable: that is exactly what coaching provides. This book brings together twenty different stories which represent the very human dilemmas a coach can encounter. Coaching is not therapy but it is closely related, and while many people seek (or are assigned) executive coaching for work problems, just like therapy each person brings their whole self to the conversation.

Exploring Jenny's beautifully written and moving stories will offer the reader a chance for deep reflection on the meaning of modern relationships.

Every one of our thoughts, actions, moods and decisions is shaped by a whole array of factors, most of which we don't pay any attention to. From culture, time and language to genetics, technology and the microorganisms living inside us - even our own unconscious routines and habits - it's clear that we aren't always in the driving seat.

The good news is that by better understanding the external and internal forces at work, we can minimise their impact on our lives. Drawing on rigorous interdisciplinary research, leading science journalists Miriam Frankel and Matt Warren bring us extraordinary stories and studies that open our eyes to the inner workings of the mind, challenge our thought processes and improve our decision-making. 

Since its beginnings during WW2, television has assumed a central role in our houses and our lives. Television has created controversy, brought coronations and World Cups into living rooms, allowed us access to 24hr news and media and as shows come and go in popularity, the history of television shows us how our society has changed.

For the first time, sporting legend Dan Carter distils his two decades at the frontiers of high-performance into his 'perfect ten' lessons.

You won't find conventional wisdom here, but hard-learned truths, including: Why great leaders are made, not born, and why they must constantly evolve. How to forge a winning team culture. Why embracing your past can be every bit as important as looking towards your future. Why empowering others leads to the best decisions. Why confidence and self-belief are nothing without humility and a beginner's mindset.

Sharpen your instincts in a world full of uncertainty and risk. The training to become a fighter pilot is among the most competitive and difficult in the world with fewer than one-in-a-thousand succeeding. Pushing a cutting-edge jet to its limits at over 1,000 mph means that every split-second decision can have catastrophic consequences. Throughout his high-pressure career in the cockpit of the world's most advanced and expensive weapons systems, Hasard Lee learned to master skills at the apex of decision-making theory and practice.

Now he shares gripping firsthand accounts from his time as a fighter pilot, and distills what he's learned into a powerful ACE Helix framework that can be used in business and in life, revealing how to: - LEARN BETTER AND FASTER - CULTIVATE MENTAL TOUGHNESS - DEVELOP THE SKILLS TO QUICKLY ASSESS, CHOOSE, AND EXECUTE - AND MUCH, MUCH MORE These combat-tested techniques have already benefitted CEO's, astronauts, CIA agents and many others, and now The Art of Clear Thinking will enable anyone to perform at their peak.

How to create the most transformative meetings and moments

Being deprived of gathering has revealed just how important it is to us; to connect with others, collaborate, share ideas and create moving, life-affirming experiences.

At a time when coming together is more crucial than ever, Priya Parker sets forth a human-centered approach to gathering that can help everyone create meaningful, memorable experiences in their lives, large and small, for work and for play.

Drawing on her wide expertise as a facilitator of high-powered gatherings around the world, Parker takes us inside events of all kinds to show what works, what doesn't, and why. She investigates a wide array of gatherings - a court hearing, a flash-mob party, an Arab-Israeli summer camp - and explains how simple changes can invigorate any group experience. The result is a book full of exciting ideas of real-world applications and one that will forever alter the way you look at your next business meeting, dinner party and garden barbecue.

In a world where we are constantly connected, it's those with the best people skills who win the day. Those who build the right relationships. Those who truly understand and connect with their colleagues, their customers, their partners. Those who others like, respect and trust.

The Art of People reveals the eleven people skills that will get you more of what you want at work, at home and in life. Accessible, easy to execute and often counter-intuitive, these include:

- The single most important question you can ever ask to win attention in a meeting
- Why it usually pays to be the one to give the bad news
- How to get everyone to want to be around you, with one word

No matter who you are or what profession you're in, The Art of People will show you how to charm and win over anyone.

Do you find it hard to say 'no'? Are you tongue-tied in important meetings? Bored of 'mansplaining' when you know that you're the best qualified person on a particular topic? Understanding the difference between being assertive and being aggressive can be a crucial lesson on your career journey, and Assert Yourself can help you find your voice and stand up for yourself.

Full of practical advice on how to change the way you work and live for the better, the book contains a self-assessment quiz, step-by-step guidance, top tips, common mistakes and advice on how to avoid them, and summaries of key points.

In Atlas of the Heart, Brown takes us on a journey through 87 of the emotions and experiences that define what it means to be human. As she maps the necessary skills and lays out an actionable framework for meaningful connection, she gives us the language and tools to access a universe of new choices and second chances - a universe where we can share and steward the stories of our bravest and most heart-breaking moments with one another in a way that builds connection.

Over the past two decades, Brown's extensive research into the experiences that make us who we are has shaped the cultural conversation and helped define what it means to be courageous with our lives. Atlas of the Heart draws on this research, as well as Brown's singular skills as a researcher/storyteller, to lay out an invaluable, research-based framework that shows us that naming an experience doesn't give the experience more power, it gives us the power of understanding, meaning and choice.

People think that when you want to change your life, you need to think big. But world-renowned habits expert James Clear has discovered another way. He knows that real change comes from the compound effect of hundreds of small decisions: doing two push-ups a day, waking up five minutes early, or holding a single short phone call.

He calls them atomic habits.

In this ground-breaking book, Clear reveals exactly how these minuscule changes can grow into such life-altering outcomes. Along the way, he tells inspiring stories of Olympic gold medallists, leading CEOs, and distinguished scientists who have used the science of tiny habits to stay productive, motivated, and happy.

These small changes will have a revolutionary effect on your career, your relationships, and your life.

Are you increasingly distracted, demotivated and unable to focus on simple tasks? There's a good chance your smartphone is to blame. In the always-on age of notifications, emails and the news cycle, it's easy to waste the majority of our days mindlessly scrolling. But according to psychiatric specialist and mental health guru Dr Anders Hansen, being tethered to our devices 24/7 is taking its toll on our mental wellbeing. Sleeplessness, anxiety, depression and burnout are just some of the consequences of feeling digitally overloaded.

In The Attention Fix, Hansen shares an informative guide to what unrestricted social media use is actually doing to our brains, and the practical steps we can take to break the addiction cycle. Unpacking the latest scientific research on the brain, he explains knowledge to cure your smartphone addiction and foster deep, single-task focus. By taking control of your screen time, you'll feel happier, healthier and more productive.

During his twenty years as a Navy SEAL, Commander Rich Diviney was intimately involved in the world-renowned SEAL selection process, which whittles exceptional candidates down to a small cadre of the most elite optimal performers. But Diviney was often surprised by which recruits washed out and which succeeded.

Someone could have all the right skills and still fail, while recruits he might have initially dismissed would prove to be top performers. The seemingly objective criteria weren't telling him what he most needed to know: Who could be part of the world's most elite military unit? 

Eventually, he cracked the code. Through years of observation, Diviney learned to identify a successful recruit's core ATTRIBUTES, the innate traits for how a person performs as an individual and as part of a team. That same methodology can be used by anyone in their personal or professional lives.

A ground-breaking exploration of the neuroscience of spirituality and a bold new paradigm for health, healing and resilience Whether it's an uplifting walk in nature, meditation or prayer, there are many ways to experience heightened awareness and escape the relentless demands of modern life. The range of opportunities of this kind suggest that it isn't dependent on faith or religion, but that it's about a different mode of living; an innate spirituality.

Lisa Miller has spent decades researching the effects of spirituality on the brain. In this book she draws on her clinical experience and award-winning research to show how an active spiritual life can transform our physical and psychological wellbeing. Bringing scientific rigour to the most intangible aspect of our lives, Miller offers insights into the neurological basis for the increased resilience that comes with nurturing spirituality and highlights its measurable positive effects: decreasing the likelihood of depression and substance abuse, and shifting the course of recovery in many other clinical settings.

Woven throughout is Miller's personal story of how, while confronting her own challenges, her professional pragmatism gave way to a greater appreciation of insights that are important to so many people and yet so often dismissed as unscientific. Brimming with inspiration and compassion, this landmark book will revolutionize your understanding of spirituality, mental health and how we find meaning and purpose in life.

BFF? will take a close look at society's most underappreciated relationship to interrogate what modern friendship means, how it can survive, why we need it and what we can do to get the most from it. Featuring interviews with brilliant women on what friendship means to them, Claire Cohen argues that, unlike romantic relationships, friendship is much harder to pin down and quantify - and shows how often our friendships are taken for granted.

An antidote to the idea that every woman must belong to a perfect girl gang, this book is a reassuring guide to help women answer for themselves, 'Have we lost it? Are we still friends? Is there too much to catch up on?'

'This is a moment to take stock. To think about who our friends really are, what that means to us, what they give us (and we give them) and what we have learnt about friendship. Because, when we get it right, there is nothing so important as having true friends. What a shame that it took a rampaging virus to make us appreciate the value of that.'

Emotional empowerment expert Sarah Prout shares how to Be the Love you believe you deserve, and how to do it by embracing lessons such as overcoming comparison traps, finding freedom in forgiveness and accepting that making choices is how life happens, but living with your choices is how growth happens. These lessons are illustrated by Prout's own raw, personal stories that range from humorous to harrowing.

By following the seven pieces of advice and trying them in your own life, you will create radical and magical inner transformation, and inner transformation will lead to outer results, whether that's within your career, relationships, or something as simple as your own self-confidence as you walk down the street. 

Do you want to achieve success in your personal and professional endeavours? The first step is to see a reality where success is possible. Only when we choose to believe we live in a world in which challenges can be overcome, in which our behaviour matters, and in which change is possible can we summon all our drive, energy, and emotional and intellectual resources to make that change possible. In Before Happiness, Shawn Achor, former Harvard professor, and bestselling author of The Happiness Advantage introduces a groundbreaking new theory about success and human potential.

Achor shows how a positive mindset is the best predictor of motivation, engagement and performance in the workplace and in your personal life and offers five practical, actionable strategies for creating this mindset that will make us more successful at work and at home: 1)Add vantage points - how to select the most valuable reality. 2)Map to success - mapping success greatly increases the chance you will get there. 3)Finding the X Spot - proven techniques for harnessing your cognitive abilities. 4)Boost the signal by cancelling the noise - how to cancel negative noise. 5)Positive Inception - how to spread positive reality to others. Backed by science, great stories, and research-based strategies, by the time you finish this book, you will have a complete understanding of exactly how to create a better reality and magnify the volume of happiness and success in your life, and equally important, transfer that positive reality to others.

From the award-winning author of The Trauma Cleaner comes an exploration of the power of belief. This book is about ghosts and gods and flying saucers and certainty in the absence of knowledge. Weaving together the stories of six extraordinary ordinary people, The Believer looks at the stories we tell ourselves to deal with the distance between the world as it is, and the world as we'd like it to be. How they can stunt us - or save us. Some of the people you will meet believe in things most people don't. Ghosts. UFOs. Heaven and the Devil. The literal creation of the universe in six days. Others believe in things most people would like to. Dying with autonomy. Facing one's own transgressions with an open heart. Intensely personal and gorgeously written Krasnostein talks with her characteristic compassion and empathy to these believers - and finds out what happens when their beliefs crash into her own. 

A novelist's gripping investigation of the forces that led his childhood best friend from academic stardom to the psychiatric hospital where he has lived since killing the woman he loved When the Rosens moved to New Rochelle, New York in 1973, Jonathan Rosen and Michael Laudor became inseparable. Both children of professors, the boys were best friends and fierce rivals who soon followed each other to Yale University. Michael blazed through Yale in three years, graduating summa cum laude and landing a top-flight consulting job. Then one day, Jonathan received a devastating call: Michael had suffered a psychotic break and was in the locked ward of a psychiatric hospital. Diagnosed with schizophrenia, Michael was still in hospital when he learned he'd been accepted to Yale Law School, and living in a halfway house when he decided, against all odds, to enroll.

Still battling delusions, he managed to graduate, and after his triumphant story was featured in The New York Times, sold a memoir for a vast sum. Ron Howard bought film rights, completing the dream for Michael and his tirelessly supportive girlfriend Carrie, and Brad Pitt was set to star. But then Michael, in the grip of psychosis, committed a horrific act that made him a front-page story of an entirely different sort. The Best Minds is Jonathan Rosen's powerful account of an American tragedy, set in the final decades of the American century, an era that coincided with the emptying out of state mental hospitals. It is a story about the bonds of friendship, the price of delusion and the mystery of identity. Tender, funny, and harrowing by turns, The Best Minds is both a beautifully rendered coming of age story and an indictment of the profound neglect of mental illness in our society.

In 12 Rules for Life, acclaimed public thinker and clinical psychologist Jordan B. Peterson offered an antidote to the chaos in our lives: eternal truths applied to modern anxieties. His insights have helped millions of readers and resonated powerfully around the world. Now in this much-anticipated sequel, Peterson goes further, showing that part of life's meaning comes from reaching out into the domain beyond what we know, and adapting to an ever-transforming world.

While an excess of chaos threatens us with uncertainty, an excess of order leads to a lack of curiosity and creative vitality. Beyond Order therefore calls on us to balance the two fundamental principles of reality - order and chaos -- and reveals the profound meaning that can be found on the path that divides them. In times of instability and suffering, Peterson reminds us that there are sources of strength on which we can all draw: insights borrowed from psychology, philosophy, and humanity's greatest myths and stories. Drawing on the hard-won truths of ancient wisdom, as well as deeply personal lessons from his own life and clinical practice, Peterson offers twelve new principles to guide readers towards a more courageous, truthful and meaningful life.

Frantz Fanon's urgent, dynamic critique of the effects of racism on the psyche is a landmark study of the black experience in a white world. Drawing on his own life and his work as a psychoanalyst to explore how colonialism's subjects internalize its prejudices, eventually emulating the 'white masks' of their oppressors, it established Fanon as a revolutionary anti-colonialist thinker.

Life is all about relationships and the quality of those connections, whether that's with family, partners, friends, colleagues or most importantly yourself. If you can get those relationships on a functional and even keel, then the other tricky stuff that life throws your way becomes easier to manage. In this warm, practical and witty book, No.1 Sunday Times bestselling psychotherapist Philippa Perry shows you how to approach life's big problems.

How do you find and keep love? What can you do so that arguments don't feel torturous? How can you get unstuck and cope with change and loss? What does it mean to you to be content? Are other people just annoying or are you the problem? With a healthy dose of sanity, Philippa Perry's compassionate advice could help you become a happier, wiser person.

How can we have better relationships?

In this Sunday Times bestseller, leading psychotherapist Philippa Perry reveals the vital do's and don'ts of relationships. This is a book for us all. Whether you are interested in understanding how your upbringing has shaped you, looking to handle your child's feelings or wishing to support your partner, you will find indispensable information and realistic tips in these pages.

Philippa Perry's sane, sage and judgement-free advice is an essential resource on how to have the best possible relationships with the people who matter to you most.

Just changing the way you think about getting older can add 7.6 years to your life.

Esteemed Yale professor Dr Becca Levy is the world's leading expert and pioneer in the field of ageing. Now she shares the secrets to a healthy and vibrant long life in this powerful and authoritative book.

Part polemic, part practical As Old As You Think offers offers stunning revelations and scientifically-proven advice on how to age well and live longer. First revealing the surprising impact our biases around ageing have on the ageing process, Dr Levy then sets out what we can do as individuals to help ourselves age well using her simple ABC method. She then tackles head on the question of how to start shifting Western cultural ideas around getting older.

Positive, surprising and full of powerful, practical advice, As Old As You Think will dismantle commonly held assumptions about how we age and leave readers looking forward to - and no longer fearing - what the future holds.