An award-winning author reveals the real-life Da Vinci Code fraud that rocked the establishment. An ancient manuscript is discovered claiming that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene. The religious world is thrown into turmoil. It sounds like the plot of a conspiracy thriller, and is one of the biggest scandals of modern scholarship. In 2012, Dr Karen King, a star professor at Harvard Divinity School, announced a blockbuster discovery at a scholarly conference just steps from the Vatican: she had found an ancient fragment of papyrus in which Jesus called Mary Magdalene 'my wife'. The tattered manuscript made international headlines. Biblical scholars were in an uproar, but King had impeccable credentials as a world-renowned authority on female figures in the lost Christian texts from Egypt known as the Gnostic gospels. As Ariel Sabar began to investigate the mysteries surrounding the papyrus, he embarked on an indefatigable globe-spanning hunt that ultimately uncovered the forgery and the identity of the forger, reckoning with fundamental questions about the nature of truth and the line between faith and reason.

A young reader's edition of The Volunteer - Jack Fairweather's Costa Book of the Year 2020. An extraordinary, eye-opening account of the Holocaust. Occupied Warsaw, Summer 1940: Witold Pilecki, a Polish underground operative, accepted a mission to uncover the fate of thousands interned at a new concentration camp, report on Nazi crimes, raise a secret army and stage an uprising. The name of the camp - Auschwitz. Over the next two and half years, and under the cruellest of conditions, Pilecki's underground sabotaged facilities, assassinated Nazi officers and gathered evidence of terrifying abuse and mass murder. But as he pieced together the horrifying Nazi plans to exterminate Europe's Jews, Pilecki realized he would have to risk his men, his life and his family to warn the West before all was lost. To do so meant attempting the impossible - but first he would have to escape from Auschwitz itself... For children aged 12 and up. Written from exclusive access to previously hidden diaries, family and camp survivor accounts, and recently declassified files. Critically acclaimed and award-winning journalist Jack Fairweather brilliantly portrays the remarkable man who volunteered to face the unknown. This extraordinary and eye-opening account of the Holocaust invites us all to bear witness.

'I went for a walk around the garden. A great tit warbled above a patch of coltsfoot. I felt a thousand discoveries awaited...' Notes from a Summer Cottage by Nina Burton is a beautifully written nature memoir about the time spent renovating a cottage in the Swedish countryside, and all the species that she encountered her during her stay. Did you know that there are more ants altogether than the number of seconds that have passed since the Big Bang? And that in relation to their size, their anthill cities can be larger than London and New York? Or, that a bird's migratory instinct is so strong that an injured stork once escaped captivity and was found six weeks later having walked 150 kilometres, following the migratory path of his flock on foot? What begins with a renovation of a an old summer cottage swiftly turns into an exploration of nature, life and philosophy, in which Nina Burton reveals the inner lives and hitherto unknown habits of the animals with which she shares. Within the walls, the ceiling and the floor of the cottage and its surrounding garden, she encounters a host of animals-ants, honey bees, foxes, squirrels, blackbirds, badgers, pigeons, deer and many more-all of whom have made her house and garden their home, and all of whom cause Nina to reflect on their role within our world.

In this provocative and eye-opening classic of investigative journalism, the #1 New York Times bestselling author and "America's best true-crime writer" (Kirkus Reviews), Ann Rule, explores the nearly twenty-year long search for America's most prolific and horrifying serial killer. In 1982, the body of Wendy Coffield is discovered floating near the sandy shore of Washington's Green River. Authorities have no idea that this tragic and violent death is only the beginning of a string of murders that will rock and terrify the Seattle area for two decades. With her signature riveting prose and in-depth research, Ann Rule takes us behind the scenes of the search for the Green River Killer, a terrifying specter who ritualistically killed young women and eluded authorities for years. From seeking the help of incarcerated serial killer Ted Bundy to Ann Rule's horrifying realization that the killer she was writing about had attended her book signings, Green River, Running Red is the suspenseful and unforgettable "definitive narrative of the brutal and senseless crimes that haunted the Seattle area for decades" (Publishers Weekly).

*THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER* A GUARDIAN AND SUNDAY TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR 'An astonishing book' James O'Brien 'A gripping, devastating read' Sunday Times The inside story of the UK's response to the pandemic from the Insight investigations unit at The Sunday Times Failures of State recounts the extraordinary political decisions taken at the heart of Boris Johnson's government during the global pandemic. Fully updated and corroborated by hundreds of sources, this is the insider's account of how the government sleepwalked into disaster and tried to cover up its role in the tragedy. Thrillingly told, it exposes one of the most scandalous failures of political leadership in British history. 'A damning indictment' Alan Johnson, Observer 'A devastating piece of journalism' Andrew Marr 'This is a scandal' Piers Morgan

Few people have changed the world like the Nobel Prize winners. Their breakthrough discoveries have revolutionised medicine, chemistry, physics and economics. Nobel Life consists of original interviews with twenty-four Nobel Prize winners. Each of them has a unique story to tell. They recall their eureka moments and the challenges they overcame along the way, give advice to inspire future generations and discuss what remains to be discovered. Engaging and thought-provoking, Nobel Life provides an insight into life behind the Nobel Prize winners. A call from Stockholm turned a group of twenty-four academics into Nobel Prize winners. This is their call to the next generations worldwide.

Exploration has never been more popular and any idea that there is nowhere left to explore is instantly disproved by the contemporary explorers who are showcased here. Most of the accounts are written by the explorers themselves, and they all vividly describe challenging and extraordinary expeditions to some of the remotest parts of the world, in extremes of temperature and aridity, often alone and on the edge of danger. Some of these explorers are very experienced and are already celebrated worldwide, others are young and less well known and just starting to make their mark; all are driven by ambition, aspiration and passion. With 25 illustrations

"Delightfully horrifying."--Popular Science
One of Mental Floss's Best Books of 2018
One of Science Friday's Best Science Books of 2018

· A mysterious epidemic of dental explosions…
· A teenage boy who got his wick stuck in a candlestick...
· A remarkable woman who, like a human fountain, spurted urine from virtually every orifice...

These are just a few of the anecdotal gems that have until now lain undiscovered in medical journals for centuries. This fascinating collection of historical curiosities explores some of the strangest cases that have perplexed doctors across the world.

From seventeenth-century Holland to Tsarist Russia, from rural Canada to a whaler in the Pacific, many are monuments to human stupidity – such as the sailor who swallowed dozens of penknives to amuse his shipmates, or the chemistry student who in 1850 arrived at a hospital in New York with his penis trapped inside a bottle, having unwisely decided to relieve himself into a vessel containing highly reactive potassium. Others demonstrate exceptional surgical ingenuity long before the advent of anaesthesia – such as a daring nineteenth-century operation to remove a metal fragment from beneath a conscious patient’s heart. We also hear of the weird, often hilarious remedies employed by physicians of yore – from crow’s vomit to port-wine enemas – the hazards of such everyday objects as cucumbers and false teeth, and miraculous recovery from apparently terminal injuries.

Blending fascinating history with lacerating wit, The Mystery of the Exploding Teeth will take you on a tour of some of the funniest, strangest and most wince-inducing corners of medical history.

A New Scientist Book of the Year Prehistory is all around us. We just need to know where to look. Juan Jose Millas has always felt like he doesn't quite fit into human society. Sometimes he wonders if he is even a Homo sapiens at all. Perhaps he is a Neanderthal who somehow survived? So he turns to Juan Luis Arsuaga, one of the world's leading palaeontologists and a super-smart sapiens, to explain why we are the way we are and where we come from. Over the course of many months the two visit different places, many of them common scenes of our daily lives, and others unique archaeological sites. Arsuaga tries to teach the Neanderthal how to think like a sapiens and, above all, that prehistory is not a thing of the past: that traces of humanity through the millennia can be found anywhere, from a cave or a landscape to a children's playground or a toy shop. Millas and Arsuaga invite you on a journey of wonder that unites scientific discovery with the greatest human invention of all: the art of storytelling.

The only account written during the original enclosure, Life Under Glass tells the story of the original crew that lived and worked inside the Biosphere 2 structure for two years, where they recycled their air, water, food, and wastes, setting a world record for time spent in a closed ecological system and gaining valuable insights for confronting climate change and environmental degradation. In Life Under Glass, Biosphere 2 crew members, Abigail Alling and Mark Nelson with co-captain Sally Silverstone present the full account of their remarkable two year enclosure, written while inside. From the struggles of growing their own food, to learning how to help sustain their life-giving atmosphere, the general reader is offered a rare glimpse into how a group of dedicated researchers managed to surprise the world and fulfill their dream. In this updated edition, a new chapter reflects on the legacy of Biosphere 2 and the state of related scientific progress. Other crews will come and go, but no one else will face the risks, the uncertainties, and the challenges that this new breed of explorers did on Biosphere 2's maiden voyage. Here is the fascinating story of how it all appeared-living under glass.

A collection of newspaper stories by award-winning Los Angeles Times reporter Christopher Goffard-including "Dirty John," the basis for the hit podcast and the upcoming Bravo scripted series starring Connie Britton and Eric Bana. Since its release in fall 2017, the "Dirty John" podcast-about a conman who terrorizes a Southern California family-has been downloaded more than 20 million times, and will soon premiere as a scripted drama on Bravo starring Connie Britton and Eric Bana. The story, which also ran as a print series in the Los Angeles Times, wasn't unfamiliar terrain to its writer, Christopher Goffard. Over two decades at newspapers from Florida to California, Goffard has reported probingly on the shadowy, unseen corners of society. This book gathers together for the first time "Dirty John" and the rest of his very best work. "The $40 Lawyer" provides an inside account of a young public defender's rookie year in the legal trenches. "Framed" offers an unblinking chronicle of suburban mayhem (and is currently being developed by Netflix as a film starring Julia Roberts). A man wrongly imprisoned for rape, train-riding runaways in love, a Syrian mother forced to leave her children in order to save them, a boy who grows up to become a cop as a way of honoring his murdered sister, another boy who struggles with the knowledge that his father is on death row: these stories reveal the complexities of human nature, showing people at both their most courageous and their most flawed. Goffard shared in the Los Angeles Times' Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 2011 and has twice been a Pulitzer finalist for feature writing. This collection-a must-read for fans of both true-crime and first-rate narrative nonfiction-underscores his reputation as one of today's most original journalistic voices.

Professor Tudor Parfitt, a real-life British Indiana Jones, has made the biggest discovery of the last 3,000 years - what became of the fabled Ark of the Covenant. This is the amazing story of his quest. This is the real-life account of Professor Tudor Parfitt's remarkable discovery - of the lost Ark of the Covenant that disappeared from the Temple of Jerusalem centuries ago. The holiest object in the world, the Ark of the Old Testament contains the tablets of law sacred to Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Scholar, orientalist and adventurer, Parfitt embarked on an incredible journey to discover where the Ark is hidden, and, when he reveals his discovery, history books will be rewritten forever. Parfitt's quest took him on an incredible detective trail across the Middle East and Africa, following the unknown journey that the guardians of the lost Ark took with their precious cargo centuries ago. His search led him through ancient documents and codes, and even the complexities of modern genetic science, for the clues to take him closer to the fabled Ark. But some people didn't want the Ark to be found. In the wilder reaches of the Yemen he narrowly escaped being kidnapped by Islamist fugitives. In Africa he was shot at, ambushed and arrested. Amongst crossing paths with a motley crowd of mystics, holy men, charlatans and politicians, he encountered a strange tribe in the mysterious lands of the Limpopo River who claimed that they knew the Ark's final resting place. When Parfitt finally set eyes on the Ark, it wasn't at all where he expected. This is the incredible story of his quest.

'No sea voyage can be dull for a man who has an eye for the ever-changing sea and sky, the waves, the wind and the way of a ship upon the water.' So observes H.W. 'Bill' Tilman in this account of two lengthy voyages in which dull intervals were few and far between. In 1966, after a succession of eventful and successful voyages in the high latitudes of the Arctic, Tilman and his pilot cutter Mischief head south again, this time with the Antarctic Peninsula, Smith Island and the unclimbed Mount Foster in their sights. Mischief goes South is an account of a voyage marred by tragedy and dogged by crew trouble from the start. Tilman gives ample insight into the difficulties associated with his selection of shipmates and his supervision of a crew, as he wryly notes, 'to have four misfits in a crew of five is too many'. The second part of this volume contains the author's account of a gruelling voyage south, an account left unwritten for ten years for lack of time and energy. Originally intended as an expedition to the remote Crozet Islands in the southern Indian Ocean, this 1957 voyage evolved into a circumnavigation of Africa, the unplanned consequence of a momentary lapse in attention by an inexperienced helmsman. The two voyages described in Mischief goes South covered 43,000 miles over twenty-five months spent at sea and, while neither was deemed successful, published together they give a fine insight into Tilman's character.

Antigua--a ten-by-twelve-mile island in the British West Indies and the author's birthplace--is the setting of a lyrical, sardonic, and forthright essay that offers an insider's eye-opening view of the lives and ways of her people.

However many times it has been done, the act of casting off the warps and letting go one's last hold of the shore at the start of a voyage has about it something solemn and irrevocable, like marriage, for better or for worse. Mostly Mischief's ordinary title belies four more extraordinary voyages made by H.W. 'Bill' Tilman covering almost 25,000 miles in both Arctic and Antarctic waters. The first sees the pilot cutter Mischief retracing the steps of Elizabethan explorer John Davis to the eastern entrance to the Northwest Passage. Tilman and a companion land on the north coast and make the hazardous crossing of Bylot Island while the remainder of the crew make the eventful passage to the southern shore to recover the climbing party. Back in England, Tilman refuses to accept the condemnation of Mischief's surveyor, undertaking costly repairs before heading back to sea for a first encounter with the East Greenland ice. Between June 1964 and September 1965, Tilman is at sea almost without a break. Two eventful voyages to East Greenland in Mischief provide the entertaining bookends to his account of the five-month voyage in the Southern Ocean as skipper of the schooner Patanela. Tilman had been hand-picked by the expedition leader as the navigator best able to land a team of Australian and New Zealand climbers and scientists on Heard Island, a tiny volcanic speck in the Furious Fifties devoid of safe anchorages and capped by an unclimbed glaciated peak. In a separate account of this successful voyage, Colin Putt describes the expedition as unique - the first ascent of a mountain to start below sea level.

ONE OF PEOPLE MAGAZINE'S BEST SUMMER READS 2022 5* 'A jaw-dropping memoir' - THE TELEGRAPH 'One of the maddest memoirs you'll read this year... a beautiful, warm, funny book.' -The Times 'Extraordinary' -The Guardian 'A wholly absorbing page-turner that everyone will want to read. You should probably buy two.' -Kirkus Starred Review 'A riveting debut.' -People Magazine 'By turns hilarious, wrenching, and achingly tender.' -Susan Orlean, New York Times bestselling author 'A remarkable and wise book, two memoirs braided together with such tendresse that readers will come to believe the ironic title in earnest' -LA TIMES 'Riveting and hilariously funny' - The Times For most of her life, Chrysta Bilton was one member of a small, if dysfunctional, family of four. There was her sister, Kaitlyn, her hedonistic, glamorous, gay mum Debra, and Jeffrey, who Debra hand-picked, in an LA hairdressers, to be the father of her children. During Chrysta's unstable childhood, Debra struggled to keep the family afloat and Jeffrey wandered in and out of their lives. Then, in her twenties, Chrysta discovered that her father had secretly donated his sperm over 500 times - and that she had at least 35 other siblings. A Normal Family is a captivating coming-of-age memoir about Chrysta's reckoning with the secrets both parents had carefully kept from her. Heartfelt, warm and funny, it's a story of embracing the family we have, in all the forms we find it.

Al Venter has been free-diving (without cages) with sharks for 40 years and has had three of his friends killed by them. The international author known for his war writing now turns his efforts on highlighting their importance to the world s ocean ecosytems.He regards the shark as one our greatest oceanic assets: remove the shark from the maritime environment and an ecological disaster will follow. For decades, the waters around South Africa have had more sharks and a greater variety of these predators than any other coastline in the world. There are several reasons, one being the annual sardine run up the east coast. The sharks draw many South Africans and others from around the world, among them Brad Pitt, Leonardo DiCaprio and King Abdullah of Jordan. Working with specialist divers and friends, as well as world-class photographers, Venter has created a book on sharks that is not only instructive but also breathtakingly beautiful and fascinating. Photographers who submitted work for publication include Fiona Ayerst, Morne Hardenberg and the diminutive shark warrior Lesley Rochat."

Freud may never have set foot in Cambridge - that hub for the twentieth century's most influential thinkers and scientists - but his intellectual impact there in the years between the two World Wars was immense. This is a story that has long languished untold, buried under different accounts of the dissemination of psychoanalysis. John Forrester and Laura Cameron present a fascinating and deeply textured history of the ways in which a set of Freudian ideas about the workings of the human mind, sexuality and the unconscious affected Cambridge men and women - from A. G. Tansley and W. H. R. Rivers to Bertrand Russell, Bernal, Strachey and Wittgenstein - shaping their thinking across a range of disciplines, from biology to anthropology, and from philosophy to psychology, education and literature. Freud in Cambridge will be welcomed as a major intervention by literary scholars, historians and all readers interested in twentieth-century intellectual and scientific life.

The only contemporary history of the birth of Silicon Valley from the reporter who had a ringside seat to it all Over the past five decades, the tech industry has grown into one of the most important sectors of the global economy, and Silicon Valley--replete with sprawling office parks, sky-high rents, and countless self-made millionaires--is home to many of its key players. But the origins of Silicon Valley and the tech sector are much humbler. At a time when tech companies' influence continues to grow, The Big Score chronicles how they began. One of the first reporters on the tech industry beat at the San Jose Mercury-News, Michael S. Malone recounts the feverish efforts of young technologists and entrepreneurs to build something that would change the world--and score them a big payday. Starting with the birth of Hewlett-Packard in the 1930s, Malone illustrates how decades of technological innovation laid the foundation for the meteoric rise of the Valley in the 1970s. Drawing on exclusive, unvarnished interviews, Malone punctuates this history with incisive profiles of tech's early luminaries--including Nobelist William Shockley and Apple's Steve Jobs--when they were struggling entrepreneurs working 18-hour days in their garages. And he plunges us into the darker side of the Valley, where espionage, drugs, hellish working conditions, and shocking betrayals shaped the paths for winners and losers in a booming industry. A decades-long story with individual sacrifice, ingenuity, and big money at its core, The Big Score recounts the history of today's most dynamic sector through its upstart beginnings.

Freud may never have set foot in Cambridge - that hub for the twentieth century's most influential thinkers and scientists - but his intellectual impact there in the years between the two World Wars was immense. This is a story that has long languished untold, buried under different accounts of the dissemination of psychoanalysis. John Forrester and Laura Cameron present a fascinating and deeply textured history of the ways in which a set of Freudian ideas about the workings of the human mind, sexuality and the unconscious affected Cambridge men and women - from A. G. Tansley and W. H. R. Rivers to Bertrand Russell, Bernal, Strachey and Wittgenstein - shaping their thinking across a range of disciplines, from biology to anthropology, and from philosophy to psychology, education and literature. Freud in Cambridge will be welcomed as a major intervention by literary scholars, historians and all readers interested in twentieth-century intellectual and scientific life.

‘Jauhar weaves his own personal and family story into his history of the heart…very effectively… This gives a certain dramatic tension to the book, as it tells the fascinating and rather wonderful history of cardiology.’ –Henry Marsh, New Statesman

A Mail on Sunday Book of the Year

The heart lies at the centre of life. For cardiologist Sandeep Jauhar it is an obsession.

In this fascinating history he interweaves gripping scenes from the operating theatre with the moving tale of his family’s history of heart problems – from the death of his grandfather to the ominous signs of how he himself might die.

Jauhar looks at the pioneers who risked patients’ lives and their own careers, and confronts the limits of medical technology, arguing that how we live is more important than any device or drug we may invent. Heart is the all-encompassing story of the engine of life.