Will Damron

We all aspire to see the world clearly. And yet all too often, when the pressure is on, we give in to our most irrational impulses - making intuitive decisions that take us ever-further from our goals. 

In Clear Thinking, Shane Parrish explains how to think clearly in any situation. He shows that the path to clear thinking lies not in the most high-stakes decisions, but in the most ordinary moments - from how we start our mornings to how we approach our daily conversations. And he uses stories, mental models, and psychological insights to offers a transformative method for seeing through our biases and understanding what's really happening. The result is a must-have manual for optimizing decision-making and living intentionally. It will clear your head and transform your life.

Few individuals have done more to shape Silicon Valley than billionaire venture capitalist and entrepreneur Peter Thiel.

From the technologies we use every day to the delicate power balance between Silicon Valley, Wall Street and Washington, Thiel has been a behind-the-scenes operator influencing countless aspects of contemporary life. But despite his power and the ubiquity of his projects, no public figure is quite so mysterious.

In the first major biography of Thiel, Max Chafkin traces the trajectory of the innovator's singular life and worldview, from his upbringing as the child of immigrant parents and years at Stanford as a burgeoning conservative thought leader to his founding of PayPal and Palantir, early investment in Facebook and SpaceX, and relationships with fellow tech titans Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and Eric Schmidt.

Do you find yourself endlessly scrolling through social media or the news while your anxiety rises? Are you feeling frazzled after a long day of endless video calls?  In this timely book, professor Cal Newport shows us how to pair back digital distractions and live a more meaningful life with less technology. By following a 'digital declutter' process, you'll learn to: Rethink your relationship with social media. Prioritize 'high bandwidth' conversations over low quality text chains. Rediscover the pleasures of the offline world. Take back control from your devices and find calm amongst the chaos with Digital Minimalism.

In his sophomore year of college, Mark Zuckerberg created a simple website to serve as a campus social network. The site caught on like wildfire, and soon students nationwide were on Facebook. Today, Facebook is nearly unrecognizable from Zuckerberg's first, modest iteration. It has grown into a tech giant, the largest social media platform and one of the most gargantuan companies in the world, with a valuation of more than $576 billion and almost 3 billion users.

Based on years of exclusive reporting and interviews with Facebook's key executives and employees, including Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, Steven Levy's sweeping narrative digs deep into the whole story of the company that has changed the world and reaped the consequences.

Every story has two sides. Every relationship has two perspectives. And sometimes, it turns out, the key to a great marriage is not its truths but its secrets. At age twenty-two, Lotto and Mathilde are tall, glamorous, madly in love, and destined for greatness. A decade later, their marriage is still the envy of their friends, but more complicated than it seems from the outside. As the years pass, stunning revelations threaten to destroy everything they've built together; but the strongest marriages are those that survive the greatest blows. Some secrets are better left in the dark. Others must be torn into the open, no matter how dangerous they are.

The White House has been breached. President Kline has left for a secret bunker with only his most trusted agents and officials: those dedicated to keeping the US government intact at all costs.

Erik Hill has given his life to the Secret Service, but years of dealing with Washington sleaze has replaced his enthusiasm with disillusionment. With the US government under attack, though, and no one better equipped to face down the threat, Erik can't ignore his calling. But he has never dealt with a threat like this.

The president may have headed to safety… but what if the danger was there with him all along? With killers ready to strike inside the bunker, it will take everything Erik has to save his leader, his country - and himself. 

The new novel from prizewinning author, Paolo Cognetti is a love story set in a tiny village high in the Italian Alps. Its protagonists, Fausto and Silvia, meet in winter, their relationship becoming a refuge in all senses, and the seasons, as well as the mountains, an integral part of their story together. It has a classic, enduring appeal, a cinematic feel, a captivating backdrop, and a romantic sensibility underpinned by a spare, powerful prose style.

Across both fiction and non-fiction, Cognetti's writing seeks to understand human interactions with landscape, interpreting what our obsessions with extremes of beauty, endurance and isolation tell us about ourselves and our relationships with others.

Jim Simons is the greatest moneymaker in modern financial history. His record bests those of legendary investors, including Warren Buffett, George Soros and Ray Dalio. Yet Simons and his strategies are shrouded in mystery. The financial industry has long craved a look inside Simons's secretive hedge fund, Renaissance Technologies and veteran Wall Street Journal reporter Gregory Zuckerman delivers the goods. 

In this fast-paced narrative, Zuckerman examines how Simons launched a quantitative revolution on Wall Street, and reveals the impact that Simons, the quiet billionaire king of the quants, has had on worlds well beyond finance.

LAPD Detective Stilwell has been forced out of the Homicide department to a dead-end post on Santa Catalina Island.

It might be an idyllic holiday destination but Stilwell knows it's a backwater to keep him out of sight and out of mind. But the usual weekend case-load of petty drunken violence is disturbed by a report of a body found in the harbour, weighed down by an anchor.

Driven to prove a point to his superiors back on the mainland, Stilwell will cross every line of protocol and jurisdiction to solve the murder case.

It's sink or swim, as failure will cost him everything, and finding the killer will reveal the dark heart of his new home. But on a small island with big secrets - someone is always watching...

Book 1 in the Catalina series.

Julia is terrified by her daughter's aggressive behaviour. Lily has changed from an angelic little girl into someone she is afraid to be alone with. What scares Julia most, though, is that she knows why Lily is acting this way, but no-one will believe her. If she is going to help Lily, she will have to find the answers alone, embarking on a search that will take her to the shadowy back streets of Venice.

It is no exaggeration to say that venture capital has been central to the greatest legal creation of wealth anywhere, and enabled much of the world we live in, yet we know surprisingly little about this strange tribe of financiers.

In The Power Law, Sebastian Mallaby turns his unprecedented access to the industry's central players into a riveting, character-driven account of venture capital and the world it has made. Most of the tech start-ups funded by Silicon Valley venture capitalists fail, but a very few hits succeed at such a scale that they will more than make up for everything else. That extreme ratio of success and failure is the power law that drives venture capital, and the wider tech sector.

Mallaby make sense of the seeming randomness of success in venture capital, an industry that supposedly relies on gut instinct and personality rather than spreadsheets and data. We learn the unvarnished truth about some of the most iconic hits and infamous disasters in Silicon Valley history?, from the comedy of errors that was the birth of Apple to the avalanche of venture money that fostered hubris at WeWork and Uber. And he shows how the power law now echoes around the world.

Elon Musk is among the most controversial titans of Silicon Valley. To some he's a genius and a visionary and to others he's a mercurial huckster. Billions of dollars have been gained and lost on his tweets and his personal exploits are the stuff of tabloids. But for all his outrageous talk of mind-uploading and space travel, his most audacious vision is the one closest to the ground: the electric car. When Tesla was founded in the 2000s, electric cars were novelties, trotted out and thrown on the scrap heap by carmakers for more than a century. But where most onlookers saw only failure, a small band of Silicon Valley engineers and entrepreneurs saw potential and they pitted themselves against the biggest, fiercest business rivals in the world, setting out to make a car that was quicker, sexier, smoother, cleaner than the competition. Tesla would undergo a truly hellish fifteen years, beset by rivals, pressured by investors, hobbled by whistleblowers, buoyed by its loyal supporters. Musk himself would often prove Tesla's worst enemy--his antics repeatedly taking the company he had funded himself to the brink of collapse. Was he an underdog, an antihero, a conman, or some combination of the three?