Amy Finegan

The 'Big Con' describes the confidence trick the consulting industry performs in contracts with hollowed-out and risk-averse governments and shareholder value-maximizing firms. It grew from the 1980s and 1990s in the wake of reforms by both the neoliberal right and Third Way progressives and it thrives on the ills of modern capitalism from financialization and privatization to the climate crisis. It is possible because of the unique power that big consultancies wield through extensive contracts and networks - as advisors legitimators and outsourcers - and the illusion that they are objective sources of expertise and capacity.

Mazzucato and Collington expertly debunk the myth that consultancies always add value to the economy. With a wealth of original research they argue brilliantly for investment and collective intelligence within all organizations and communities and for a new system in which public and private sectors work innovatively for the common good.

Ranging from the ragtime era to small-town America in the seventies, Searching for Caleb is a moving quest for a family's deepest roots - and a haunting story of growing up and breaking away, acceptance and rebellion.

Gloria Mendes is in love with her boss, and hopes that with him she will find the happiness she yearns for. When Carl disappears in Mexico she suspects foul play. As she searches she gets close to the dark forces surrounding carl, and endangers her own life.

A week after her forty-first birthday, Anne Boyer was diagnosed with highly aggressive triple-negative breast cancer. For a single mother living payslip to payslip who had always been the caregiver rather than the one needing care, the catastrophic condition was both a crisis and an initiation into new ideas about mortality and the gendered politics of illness. A twenty-first-century Illness as Metaphor, as well as a harrowing memoir of survival, The Undying explores the experience of illness as mediated by digital screens, weaving in ancient Roman dream diarists, cancer hoaxers and fetishists, cancer vloggers, corporate lies, John Donne, pro-pain 'dolorists', the ecological costs of chemotherapy, and the many little murders of capitalism.