Air-fryer queen Louisa Holst knows what the market needs and is back with a bang – featuring delicious meals ready in just 30 minutes! Enjoy lip-smacking Biryani chicken salad, zesty Hake and jalapeño bake, Pork chops with roasted chakalaka and flavour-packed samp and beans sausage stew. This book delivers bold flavors with minimal effort. And to finish on a sweet note? Yes, there are delectable desserts too – all prepared in just 30 minutes!

In Upwards, Karen Dudley invites us on a culinary journey that transcends the ordinary, encouraging us to look up to what is true and essential – living simply and well.

In this follow-up to Onwards, Karen, with her signature warmth and insight, shares how the act of cooking can – and should be – a letting go of life’s daily preoccupations, a way to connect with ourselves and others, by paying attention to the pleasure and enjoyment of cooking something beautiful, delicious and even surprising.

Sharing recipes from a vibrant palette of flavours, Upwards lifts Karen’s loyal community towards the next level – to learn new skills, to look up to quality over quantity and to pay attention to the splendour that can come from the meditative act of cooking. Upwards is thus a call to be inspired, to create and to connect, all the time looking up, up, up, as we invite into our kitchens new dishes, new flavours and new possibilities.

Unlock a world of joyful flavor in your kitchen by using only 8 simple spices.

Nadiya wants to share with you the 8 readily available spices she uses every day at home to cook her most-loved meals, the same spices that her Mum uses and her Nani used before her.

Cardamom, fennel, cinnamon, turmeric, cumin, chilli, bay leaves and curry powder are all you need to create any recipe in this book, including:

• Peshwari Naans
• Back-of-the-fridge Pakoras
• Yoghurt Chicken
• Daal
• Crispy Leek Biryani
• No-need-to-wait Chutney
• Badam Cheesecake
• Iced Caramel Bay Tea

From beautiful breakfasts, midday lunches and staple recipes you won't live without again, to tips for the perfect saucepan of rice, your favorite middle of the table curries, vegetables, side dishes and sweets, you'll be confident in cooking extraordinary family food, filled to the brim with easy-to-achieve flavor.

Renowned chef Jan Hendrik van der Westhuizen regularly leads selected groups of guests on a JAN Voyage – culinary journeys to France and Italy.

This cookbook, JAN Voyage, takes readers and home cooks on memorable taste explorations, transporting them to places they’ve never been to – which lie off the map in secret locations and ancient medieval villages – and sometimes back to ones they hold dear. The book is a compass, pointing towards the richness of encounters, both great and small, that define what it means to voyage.

Each recipe unlocks the essence of a place that has captured Jan Hendrik’s heart and the people met on the journey.

A brand new collection of inspiring recipes from Sunday Times bestselling author Sabrina Ghayour - each designed to be as easy as possible.

Every recipe in Persiana Easy make irresistible Middle Eastern flavours simple. From midweek meals and traybakes to pastries and sweet treats, every recipe is accompanied by a photograph to make beautiful cookery easier than ever.

CONTENTS INCLUDE:

• Dips, Snacks and Light Bites including Sweet Potato, Basil and Feta Dip; Crispy Za'atar Salt and Pepper Prawns; Popcorn Halloumi
• Bread and Pastry: including Turkish Pide Bread; Easy Bake Bagels(ish); Fig, Goat Cheese, Thyme and Honey Rolls
• Salads: including Smoked Aubergine Salad with Pickled Chillies and Feta; Duck and Pomegranate Salad with Honey Pomegranate Sauce; Broad Bean, Pea, Orange and Goats Cheese Salad
• Midweek Meals: including Lamb Kofta Patties with Yogurt and Burnt Orange; Butterflied Orange Paprika Butter Chicken; Shish Kebab
• Comfort Food: including Turkish Lentil Soup; Couscous Royale with Spiced Lamb Shanks; Orange Spiced Pork with Charred Spring Onions and Pineapple
• Roasts and Traybakes: including Spiced Saffron Chicken Kebabs; Tray-baked Harissa Lamb Chops; Baked Meatballs with Tomato, Harissa and Feta
• Vegetables and Side Dishes: including Hot and Sour Green Beans; Mashed Chickpeas with Spice Oil; Stuffed Baby Peppers with Date Couscous and Feta
• Sweet Treats: including Citrus and Spice Almond Tart; Bokaj; Apple Borek

""If your 'weighty thinking' does not change, then even if you lose weight you'll retain an overwhelming subconscious urge to gain it back. It's less important how quickly you lose weight, and more important how holistically you lose weight; you want your mind, your emotions, and your body to all 'lose weight.' Weight that disappears from your body but not from your soul is simply recycling outward for a while " "but is almost certain to return. It's self-defeating, therefore, to struggle to drop excess weight unless " "you are also willing to drop the thought-forms that initially produced it and now hold it in place."" -- Marianne Williamson What is the connection between spirituality and weight loss? Best-selling author Marianne Williamson is about to answer that question for you in her groundbreaking new book, bringing you 21 spiritual lessons to help you surrender your weight forever. These lessons form a holistic paradigm for weight loss, addressing the spiritual, emotional, and psychological elements involved in what Williamson refers to as "conscious weight loss." If you are a food addict, a compulsive eater, or someone who for any reason sees food as the enemy, this book is for you. "A Course in Weight Loss" addresses the true causal root of your weight-loss issues: a place within you where you have forgotten your divine perfection. This forgetfulness has confused not only your mind but also your body, making you reach for that which cannot sustain you . . . and reject that which does. As your mind reclaims its spiritual intelligence, your body will reclaim its natural intelligence as well. The 21 lessons in this book will take you on a deep, sacred journey. One step at a time, you will learn to shift your relationship with yourself--and your body--from one of fear to one of love. And you will begin to integrate the various parts of yourself--mind, body, and spirit--to become, once again, and in all ways, the beautiful and peaceful person you were created to be. As Williamson writes: "When it comes to your enjoyment of eating, your best days are not behind you but ahead of you " So get ready to begin a new relationship with food . . . and with yourself.

Turkish-Cypriot Deliciousness Every Day.

Dinner Tonight is a celebration of flavour and the simple joy of cooking. Enjoy fast, fresh and filling recipes, including zingy salads, warming soups, scrumptious sandwiches and things on toast, all-in-one pots of hearty pasta and stews, tasty traybakes, breads and sweet things.

Find recipes ready in 30-minutes or less, food that’s quick to prepare and effortless to cook, and Meliz’s favourite ‘cheat’ versions of traditional recipes such as börek, dolma and manti – you’ll always have something utterly delicious to eat.

An adventure story, love story, travelogue, naturalist memoir, and spiritual guide, Craig Foster's Amphibious Soul is a scientist and adventurer’s perspective on “rewilding”―developing a deep connection to our animal selves that can reinvigorate our lives. Told in Craig’s warm and passionate voice, this extraordinary book will change not only the way we interact with the natural world, but the way we fundamentally see ourselves.

A decade ago, living in a city and feeling exhausted and empty, Craig decided to return to his birthplace―the Cape of Good Hope―and dive into the great African Sea forest each day. His daily oceanic adventures not only helped him “rewild”, but helped him come to see his own “amphibious soul” as a powerful metaphor for the human condition. We homo sapiens are by nature wild animals attempting to exist in a docile world. So how can we reclaim our wildness in a world that wants us to stay so tamed?

An extraordinary literary work, Amphibious Soul is a riveting narrative filled with meticulous descriptions of an adventure in the natural world that speaks to readers on an intimate level, challenging us to consider our personal relationship to nature, and inspiring us to realign our daily practices to help save the global ecosystem. Whether we live close to nature or in an urban jungle, Craig shows us how to nurture our individual wildness, tap into our empathy, and deepen our love for all living things. He teaches us to track the wild around us, and by doing so become present in the moment and revel in being wondrously alive.

Featuring breathtaking original photos and QR codes that access mini-videos of never-seen-before animal interactions, Amphibious Soul is a remarkable experience that will transform us and ultimately our world.

A bestseller for 21 years, Mike Lundy’s Best Walks in the Cape Peninsula remains one of the most popular books on hiking in Cape Town.

Each of the 30 day walks in this classic collection has been carefully chosen because of a particular point of interest, be it a waterfall, grotto, yellowwood grove, shipwreck or spectacular viewpoint. The routes range from challenging climbs to the top of Table Mountain to leisurely strolls among the fynbos or along city beaches, and will appeal to hikers of all levels of experience – whether aspiring ramblers or diehard adventurers.

A simple grading system, information on the average hiking time, notes on the availability of water and practical advice on mountain safety and weather conditions ensure that the hiker is given a clear idea of what to expect. Every walk is accompanied by an accurate map and an easy-to-follow route description, spiced with historical snippets and nature notes.

For this eighth edition, all route descriptions and maps have been brought up to date, the design and typography have been given a fresh, modern look and photographs and illustrations add lively interest. With so many spectacular walks to choose from in the Cape Peninsula, Mike Lundy’s Best Walks in the Cape Peninsula is the ultimate authority on the best and quickest escape from the rat race – even if only for a day.

New results require new ways of acting. New ways of acting require new ways of looking at things … It’s called ‘reframing’, and it’s one of the most effective things humans ever do. Over the past decades, there have been amazing breakthroughs in behavioural economics. What if you could gather all the best ones in one place? An entire book packed full of ‘smart-cuts’…?

Steve Jobs once made an interesting point: ‘Animals in the wild may be more energy-efficient than humans. But put a guy on a bike, and he blows past all of them.’ That’s because technology is ‘like a bicycle for the mind.’
Turns out, the landscape is littered with bicycles. Adopt the principles and you can do almost everything faster and better. Here you will find direct answers to questions like: ‘How do you get the most out of your brain?’, What’s the best way to structure a team?’ or even, ‘How can our business be ten times cheaper or ten times faster than an industry giant?’
 
These insights are gamechangers. They come from trusted sources and work in the real world. Here is a condensation of the best brilliant breakthroughs across a range of spheres, in one easy guide. Whether you are chasing personal goals, leading teams, persuading others or are merely interested in clever ways of living the human experience, you will pick up dozens of ingenious accelerators within the pages of  Wicked Smart.

Load-shedding sucks! You know it. We know it. The whole country knows it. It’s also no secret that it’s here to stay for the foreseeable future. Is it annoying, frustrating and downright infuriating? Yes, no question about it.

However, every blackout is a fire begging to be built, a juicy chop ready to be turned and a family braai just waiting to happen. With a little planning, some clever thinking and 40 great recipes – quick and easy, plan ahead and weekend winners – load-shedding can go from the worst part of your day to the best.

Follow more recipes to become the king of condiments and the sultan of sauces, then power up your pantry with a store-bought collection of spices, smears, sauces and jazzer-uppers.

Put your money where your braaibroodjie goes and join the Beer Country duo as they dive into their best braai recipes for the Eishkom disaster. Welcome to the braaight side of load-shedding life!

"Warm, honest and true--A Woman Makes A Plan is full of insight as well as a good dose of humor, offering readers a lifetime of hard-won advice." --Diane Von Furstenberg The international supermodel shares personal stories and lessons learned from a life of "living dangerously--carefully"

Maye Musk is a fashionable, charming, jet-setting supermodel with a fascinating and tight-knit circle of family and friends--and is 71 years old. But things were not always so easy or glamorous--she became a single mom at 31, struggling through poverty to provide for her three children; dealt with weight issues as a plus-size model and overcame ageism in the modeling industry; and established a lifelong career as a respected dietitian, all the while starting over in eight different cities across three countries and two continents. But she made her way through it all with an indomitable spirit and a no-nonsense attitude to become a global success at what she calls the "prime of her life."

As everyone who follows her obsessively on social media knows, Maye is a fount of frank and practical advice on how the choices you make in every decade can pay off in surprising, exciting ways throughout your life. In A Woman Makes a Plan, Maye shares experiences from her life conveying hard-earned wisdom on career (the harder you work, the luckier you get), family (let the people you love go their own way), health (there is no magic pill), and adventure (make room for discovery, but always be ready for anything). You can't control all that happens in life, but you can have the life you want at any age. All you have to do is make a plan.

'An invaluable resource for making sense of the world, making good decisions, and placing smart bets. A fast-paced and fun read jam-packed with useful information on every page.' Annie Duke, author of Thinking in Bets ________________ Turn yourself into a superthinker and make the right decisions every time. You want to make better decisions. You want to be right more of the time professionally and personally. However, being more right consistently is a hard problem because the world is such a complex, evolving place. How do you navigate this complexity? Mental models are decision-making tools that guide our perception of the world and our behaviour in it. They help us understand life, make decisions and solve problems. The best models help us make intelligent investments, develop ground-breaking technologies and even travel to outer space. - Note your frame of reference before debating someone with different political views. If you understand how your perspective contrasts with someone else's you can prevent the conversation from getting hostile. - Apply the sunk cost fallacy to the end of a doomed project. Just because you've put a lot of hours into it doesn't mean that you have to keep going. - Before blaming someone, consider Hanlon's Razor, 'Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by carelessness'. - Try to solve mysteries with Occam's Razor, 'Among competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected'. When you hear hoof beats, think of horses not zebras. Building on our knowledge of well-known models such as the Bandwagon Effect or Paradigm Shift and introducing us to the lesser known like the Eisenhower Matrix or the Boiling Frog Symbol, this indispensable book distils the most effective mental models into a single, digestible volume. It will make even the most complex models accessible and engaging to enable you to make better, more informed decisions in every part of your life. ________________ 'Internalizing these mental models will help you understand the world around you. Once you can spot them, you can change your own behavior to avoid common traps, adjust how you interact with people to get better results, and maybe even articulate new mental models of the world that have yet to be discovered.' Brian Armstrong, co-founder and CEO, Coinbase 'You can't really know anything if you just remember isolated facts. If the facts don't hang together on a latticework of theory, you don't have them in a usable form. You've got to have models in your head.' Charlie Munger, vice chairman, Berkshire Hathaway

Do you like the direction your decisions are taking you?

Most of us make choices we regret—choices that have moved our lives in a direction we don't want to go. But you have the ability to break the cycle of bad decisions and form better habits.

Drawing on Scripture, story, and the latest psychological research into human behavior, pastor Craig Groeschel reveals the power of "pre-deciding"—the key to consistently making choices that will lead you out of a downward spiral and into the joy and freedom God has for you.

With thought-provoking exercises and questions for reflection, Think Ahead will help you:

• Understand the science behind your decision-making habits.
• Overcome decision fatigue and debilitating fears.
• Diminish the role of emotions in decision-making.
• See how your small choices shape the kind of person you become.

**AS SEEN ON CHANNEL 4** 130 brand-new recipes to cook up at home, any day of the week... Following their bestselling Fast 800 Recipe Book, Dr Clare Bailey and Justine Pattison return with a fabulous new cookbook, featuring super-simple recipes to enable you to eat well with minimum prep time on your fasting days. All of the dishes in this book are based on the Mediterranean style of eating now proven to revolutionise your health, and many can be thrown together from freezer or store-cupboard staples. There are numerous vegetarian options, plus simple ways to expand meals for non-fast days or when you are eating with friends or family. With everything from salads and wraps to winter stews and curries, The Fast 800 Easy will help you rustle up delicious, nutritious meals in minutes - food that tastes so good you won't feel the low calorie count. 'One word - brilliant! I lost 28lb in 9-10 weeks and 7 inches off my waist. Also dropped 2 clothes sizes. Love this programme!' - Anne INCLUDES 8 WEEKS OF CALORIE-COUNTED MEAL PLANS

Jamie's new cookbook brings together 100 ultimate comfort food recipes. It's all about the dishes that are close to your heart, that put a smile on your face and make you feel happy, loved, safe and secure. Inspired by everything from childhood memories to the changing of the seasons, and taking into account the guilty pleasures and sweet indulgences that everyone enjoys, it's brimming with exciting recipes you'll fall in love with.

Jamie's Comfort Food is all about the food you really want to eat, made exactly how you like it. With this in mind, the book features ultimate versions of all-time favourites, and also introduces cherished dishes from countries around the world, providing a delicious recipe for every occasion. This isn't everyday cooking - this is about weekends, holidays, celebrations and occasions. Whether you're home alone, or sharing the love with a big group of family or friends, there really is something for everyone. Celebrating the beauty of good food is at the heart of this book, and it's jam-packed with incredible photography.

Written in Jamie's usual down-to-earth and easy-to-understand style, the methods are precise and have been tested to the hilt, so are guaranteed to work, but this time Jamie has turned the edit filter off, and shares extra hints, tips and ideas throughout to ensure you achieve the best possible results. This is about making food the very best it can be, and embracing the rituals of cooking. Recipes include everything from mighty moussaka, delicate gyoza with crispy wings, steaming ramen and katsu curry to super eggs Benedict, scrumptious sticky toffee pudding and tutti frutti pear tarte tatin.

Treat yourself, and your loved ones, with Jamie's Comfort Food.

Eating for health is finally exciting, with these nutritionally balanced recipes and time-saving health hacks you can be reassured your meal is good for you and rich with flavour.

As a GP working in the NHS, Dr Rupy Aujla knows that the simple act of eating well every day is one of the most powerful forms of medicine. Cook from this book and you'll just know the food you're eating is helping you:

• Maintain protein for bone strength and longevity
• Support gut health to help you think clearly and sleep better
• Lower inflammation to eliminate stress

Championing meat, dairy and plant-based protein these are simple and delicious recipes for every meal of the day including Miso Beans on Toasted Rye, Rupy's High-protein Rigatoni and Cumin Curry with Crispy Chicken.

Backed by the latest scientific research on how to balance protein, fibre and nutrient-rich vegetables all signposted on the page, The Doctor's Kitchen: Healthy High Protein will help you build a meal plan that will suit your individual dietary needs and supercharge your metabolic, heart and brain health.

"My name is Samantha and I’m an alcoholic. At the time of writing, I’ve been sober for 13 years, 11 months and 16 days. And yes I still count. I promised I would never speak about it publicly until my children understood what that meant, that mommy was an alcoholic. I think they may have understood long before I did."

From Whiskey To Water is the no-holds-barred memoir by one of South Africa’s most loved radio talk show hosts, Sam Cowen. Having kept her alcohol addiction well away from the public eye for over 14 years, in this tell-all tale, Sam finds the courage to talk about her struggle with her addiction to whiskey, food and finally to a passion that saved her life – marathon swimming. Told in her characteristically hilarious dead-pan style, this is one of the bravest books you’ll read this year.

"So this is a book on how I stopped drinking? No, it’s not. It’s how I stopped drinking, started eating, became clinically severely obese, stopped eating (everything that wasn’t nailed down) and swam my way to freedom. No, it’s not. It’s actually about addiction and learning and sadness and anxiety and love and drive. It’s about channelling the unchangeable into the miraculous. It’s about dragons and learning how to put them to sleep when you can’t slay them. It’s about being my own Daenarys."

Platter's Wine Guide celebrates a remarkable 46 years of showcasing South Africa's winegrowers and grape-spirit distillers in the new 2026 edition, with an alluring cover colour invoking sunsets over iconic Table Bay. All the best-selling features of the collectible editions - descriptions and ratings of around 6,000 wines, winery profiles, wine-country maps and more - are present and fully updated. Comprehensive yet engaging, welcoming of newcomers to the vine, it's the perfect independent companion for anyone who lifts a glass of South African wine.

Are you tired of feeling overwhelmed, stressed, and stuck in a cycle of low energy, anxiety, and fear? There is a powerful, often overlooked solution to these challenges: the hidden power within your heart.

For centuries, ancient wisdom has recognized the heart as a power center, a gateway to our highest potential. Modern science now confirms that this “heart brain” significantly influences our physical and emotional well-being, as well as our perceptions and thoughts.

In The Hidden Power of the Five Hearts, New York Times bestseller Kimberly Snyder unveils the secret to harnessing your heart’s intelligence. Combining ancient wisdom with cutting-edge science on heart-brain communication, Kimberly offers transformative insights to help you deeply connect to your heart’s power. This essential guide will lead you through five stages to awaken the vast intelligence and power of your heart.

Unlocking this power can lead to extraordinary improvements in your health, relationships, confidence, and overall peace. You’ll also learn the 8-minute HeartAlign Meditation, proven to boost physical, emotional, and psychological balance by 29 percent in just four weeks.

Break free from overthinking, embrace heart-based living, and experience a life of clarity, flow, and purpose, transforming every aspect of your existence.

In this poignant, funny, and disarmingly honest memoir, one of the world’s most beloved storytellers, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Book Thief, tells of his family’s adoption of three troublesome rescue dogs—a charming and courageous love story about making even the most incorrigible of animals family.

There’s a madman dog beside me, and the hounds of memory ahead of us . . . It’s love and beasts and wild mistakes, and regret, but never to change things.

What happens when the Zusak family opens their home to three big, wild, street-hardened dogs—Reuben, more wolf than hound; Archer, blond, beautiful, destructive; and the rancorously smiling Frosty, who walks like a rolling thunderstorm?

The answer can only be chaos: There are street fights, park fights, public shamings, property damages, injuries, hospital visits, wellness checks, pure comedy, shocking tragedy, and carnage that must be read to be believed.

There is a reckoning of shortcomings and failure, a strengthening of will, but most important of all, an explosion of love—and the joy and recognition of family.

Three Wild Dogs (and the Truth) is a tender, motley, and exquisitely written memoir about the human need for both connection and disorder, a love letter to the animals who bring hilarity and beauty—but also the visceral truth of the natural world—straight to our doors and into our lives and change us forever.

Fawning is the vital, newly-discovered topic in psychology. You've heard of fight, flight and freeze - but fawning might be the most common trauma response of all. Learn how to work through it and find freedom with the leading expert, Dr. Ingrid Clayton.

Do you avoid conflict?
Do you tend to take the blame?
Do you take care of others at the expense of yourself?
Do you live in a state of hypervigilance?

Fawning can present as being more of who someone is: smart, generous, successful, funny, or beautiful, while for others it's about being less: vocal, ethnic, creative, self-assured or boundaried. Fawning can be visible or invisible; it can manifest in our relationships to sex or money, or in the tendency to 'people-please'; but one thing remains constant: it is about finding safety in an unsafe world, often at our own expense.

Fawning expert and clinical psychologist Dr. Ingrid Clayton is here to bring clarity and support. The first book by a practitioner with years of experience, Fawning will shine a light on this under-represented but crucial piece of the trauma puzzle. Drawing on twenty years of clinical psychology work, as well as a lifetime of insight as a recovering fawner herself, this groundbreaking book brings this emerging concept into the mainstream conversation. Readers will learn WHY we fawn, HOW to recognize the signs of fawning and WHAT we can do to successfully 'unfawn', using Clayton's invaluable tools and resources to find meaningful, reciprocal connections - and finally be ourselves.

Carve a path to success through ease. One that lights you up with a sense of soul, flow and grace. When we embrace the elegant power in our own lives, we step into our ‘inner knowing’ and fully own our innate, intuitive and individual gifts. When we unshackle from the shoulds of societal conditioning around how we are expected to show up in our lives we redefine success on our own terms, as we own what makes us different, special and unique. But how do we do this? By stepping into our own natural light.

It’s not about changing or becoming. It’s about remembering and knowing that we are already enough. Our authentic nature glows from within at a soul level. It emanates from every pore with our knowing that we have elegant power in our enoughness. This is the path to easefulness in our lives – success through ease. When we are grounded in a sense of self-worth and self-love we do not seek approval or validation from outside of ourselves. We need to live more deliberately and authentically, owning our own path in a way that celebrates, accepts and embraces our own innate power with an elegant soul, flow and grace.

Nicky Rowbotham’s Embrace Your Elegant Power will help you move from playing small to shining bright in your own life, in a way that works for you. It will shift your perspectives and create a sense of spaciousness and thoughtful simplicity within your life for a more aligned, authentic individual energy to come through.

Full of powerful, personal and transformative stories and insights, Embrace Your Elegant Power is your level-up guide to celebrating your own uniqueness and using easefulness as the frequency holder for your life.

This diary is uniquely illustrated around the zodiac theme and will stand out strikingly against other diaries. It brings lunar wisdom into your day to day, with life-coaching tools and tips each week. The planner is divided by zodiac sign, showing how the sun's movement through the zodiac affects everyone's energies, whatever star sign. It displays the effect of planetary conjunctions and how Mercury entering retrograde affects our decision making and fortunes. The diary illustrates the characteristics of each zodiac sign and how that impacts on the events of your life. Pisces is the dreamer, so when the sun enters Pisces, it's time to implement steps to move closer to your dream life. Taurus is the time to plan financial abundance. Aries is a concentrated energy to begin something, whether that's a vigorous new exercise programme or a new project. Astrology is a wonderful tool you can use everywhere, you don't need to be mystical to enjoy it.

From New York Times bestselling coauthor of The Coddling of the American Mind, an essential investigation into the collapse of youth mental health—and a plan for a healthier, freer childhood.

After more than a decade of stability or improvement, the mental health of adolescents plunged in the early 2010s. Rates of depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicide rose sharply, more than doubling on many measures. Why?

In The Anxious Generation, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt lays out the facts about the epidemic of teen mental illness that hit many countries at the same time. He then investigates the nature of childhood, including why children need play and independent exploration to mature into competent, thriving adults. Haidt shows how the “play-based childhood” began to decline in the 1980s, and how it was finally wiped out by the arrival of the “phone-based childhood” in the early 2010s. He presents more than a dozen mechanisms by which this “great rewiring of childhood” has interfered with children’s social and neurological development, covering everything from sleep deprivation to attention fragmentation, addiction, loneliness, social contagion, social comparison, and perfectionism. He explains why social media damages girls more than boys and why boys have been withdrawing from the real world into the virtual world, with disastrous consequences for themselves, their families, and their societies.

Most important, Haidt issues a clear call to action. He diagnoses the “collective action problems” that trap us, and then proposes four simple rules that might set us free. He describes steps that parents, teachers, schools, tech companies, and governments can take to end the epidemic of mental illness and restore a more humane childhood.

Haidt has spent his career speaking truth backed by data in the most difficult landscapes—communities polarized by politics and religion, campuses battling culture wars, and now the public health emergency faced by Gen Z. We cannot afford to ignore his findings about protecting our children—and ourselves—from the psychological damage of a phone-based life.