Gabra Zackman

Jane Dorner has two modes:

PR Jane is twenty-five, breezy, clever in a non-threatening way and eager to sell you a feminist vibrator.

Actual Jane is twenty-nine, drifting through mediocre workdays and lackluster dates while paralysed by her crushing mountain of overdue bills.

Enter the impossibly gorgeous Cass, whom Jane discovers scrolling through Instagram - the guru of a 'wellness retreat' based out of a ramshackle country house that may or may not be giving off cult vibes. Suddenly Jane realises she might have found the one ladder she can climb.

But inner peace and glowing skin will always come at a price...

So said Simone de Beauvoir, one of the world's most influential philosophers, whose pioneering work asks how we can live our most fulfilling lives and be our most vibrant selves. But in the age of so-called authenticity, what does her philosophy offer us today? In this galvanising tour of her defiant strategies for living, we explore how de Beauvoir can teach us to free ourselves of fears and stereotypes and live in a way that is truly authentic to our desires and beliefs.

At home, at work, in love, families and friendship, Skye Cleary shows us how de Beauvoir's philosophy can help us become more attuned to living purposefully, thoughtfully, and with a little more rebellious spirit. An authentic life is the goal but, warning: happiness may be a side effect.

So often deployed as a jingoistic, even menacing, rallying cry, or limited by a focus on passing moments of liberation, the rhetoric of freedom both rouses and repels. Does it remain key to our autonomy, justice and wellbeing, or is freedom's long star turn coming to a close? Does a continued obsession with the term enliven and emancipate, or reflect a deepening nihilism (or both)? On Freedom examines such questions by tracing the concept's complexities in four distinct realms: art, sex, drugs and climate. Drawing on a vast range of material, from critical theory to pop culture to the intimacies and plain exchanges of daily life, Nelson explores how we might think, experience or talk about freedom in ways responsive to the conditions of our day. Her abiding interest lies in ongoing "practices of freedom" by which we negotiate our interrelation with - indeed, our inseparability from - others, with all the care and constraint that relation entails, while accepting difference and conflict as integral to our communion. For Nelson, thinking publicly through the knots in our culture - from recent art world debates to the turbulent legacies of sexual liberation, from the painful paradoxes of addiction to the lure of despair in the face of the climate crisis - is itself a practice of freedom, a means of forging fortitude, courage and company. On Freedom is an invigorating, essential book for challenging times.

Twelve people on the move around planet Earth, twelve individual lives, each in turmoil, and each in some way touching the next. In this nuanced and deeply moving sequence, David Szalay's diverse protagonists circumnavigate the world in twelve plane journeys, from London to Madrid, from Dakar to Sao Paulo, to Toronto, to Delhi, to Doha, en route to see lovers and parents, children and siblings, or nobody at all.

Along the way, Szalay deftly depicts the ripple effect that, knowingly or otherwise, a person's actions have on those around them, and invites us to consider our own place in the vast and delicately balanced network of human relationships that is the world we live in today.