Award-winning classicist, ancient historian and author Emily Hauser takes readers on an epic journey through the latest archaeological discoveries and DNA secrets of the Aegean Bronze Age, as she uncovers the astonishing true story of the real women behind ancient Greece’s greatest legends – and the real heroes of those ancient epics, Homer's Iliad and Odyssey.

Did you ever wonder who the real women behind the myths of the Trojan War were? Because, contrary to perceptions built up over three millennia, ancient history is not all about men – and it's not only men's stories that deserve to be told . . .

In Mythica Emily Hauser tells, for the first time, the extraordinary stories of the real women behind some of the western world’s greatest legends. Following in their footsteps, digging into the history behind Homer’s epic poems, piecing together evidence from the original texts, recent astonishing archaeological finds and the latest DNA studies, she reveals who these women – queens, mothers, warriors, slaves – were, how they lived, and how history has (or has not – until now) remembered them.

A riveting new history of the Bronze Age Aegean and a journey through Homer’s epics charted entirely by women – from Helen of Troy, Briseis, Cassandra and Aphrodite to Circe, Athena, Hera, Calypso and Penelope – Mythica is a ground-breaking reassessment of the reality behind the often-mythologized women of Greece’s greatest epics, and of the ancient world itself as we learn ever more about it.

On a defining evening of the 1980s, Donald Trump hosted celebrities and high rollers in a Jersey Shore town to witness 21-year-old Mike Tyson knock out Michael Spinks in just 91 seconds, earning more than the annual payrolls of the Los Angeles Lakers and Boston Celtics combined.

Only eight years earlier, Tyson, a troubled child from Brooklyn, was taken under the wing of boxing legend Cus D’Amato in upstate New York. Their story of mutual redemption captivated novelists, screenwriters, and the emerging cable TV industry. Tyson became HBO’s leading man long before Tony Soprano.

Despite the immense success, Tyson's story was more complex and darker than it appeared. Over the decades, he has been villainized, lionized, and fetishized―but never fully humanized until now. Acclaimed biographer Mark Kriegel, who first encountered Tyson as a young reporter, explores Tyson's life through what he survived rather than whom he knocked out.

Tyson, often compared to Jack Dempsey, was more akin to Sonny Liston―Black, feared, and expected to die young. What made Liston a pariah made Tyson a touchstone for a generation influenced by hip hop and gunfire. Kriegel captures not just Tyson’s rise but his profound impact on the American psyche.

Entranced by history and myth, captivated by the wonders of nature, Damian Le Bas explores the meaning we find in sunken ruins around the world.

Thousands of years ago, an island off the Straits of Gibraltar went to war with ancient Athens. The battle was lost, and an earthquake cleaved the land in two. Overnight the island sank beneath the waves – or so legend tells.

As a young boy, Damian Le Bas was captivated by the story of the lost city of Atlantis. As an adult, he dreams of diving to discover its ruins. After the death of his father, torn between his lifelong desire and the taboo his Romany culture places on the ocean, he comes by chance across a dive shop. He can’t help but go in.

Under the waves, Damian enters a breathtaking world. As he masters the skills of this exhilarating sport, diving with seals in the Farne Islands, exploring submerged Roman ruins in Naples and mapping the sunken city of Port Royal in Jamaica, he is entranced anew, by wonders both man-made and natural.

Plato's writings on Atlantis were a parable about the hubris of humankind; in witnessing our effects on oceans and ocean communities, Damian finds echoes of this in the modern world.

A spellbinding love letter to diving, The Drowned Places is also a profound examination of the power that myth has over us, and what happens when it crosses over into reality.

Armed with a terminal diagnosis, a grudge, and a rental car, forty-year-old Hester sets out to fulfill her lifelong dream of killing her absent abusive father in this brilliantly subversive and bleakly funny novel.

"What would killing him accomplish? Nothing, mostly. Then again, neither would letting him live."

When Hester is diagnosed with cancer on her fortieth birthday, she knows immediately what she must do: abandon her possessions and drive to California to kill her estranged father. With no friends or family tying her to the life she’s built in New York City, she quits her wildly lucrative job in corporate law and sets off. She hasn’t made it far when she runs into John, an eco-activist in need of a ride to superfund sites where he documents environmental crimes. From five-star Midwestern hotels to cultish Southwestern compounds, the two slowly make their way across the country. But will the experiences they have along the way dissuade Hester from her final goal?

Ragingly singular and surprisingly moving, combining tragic intensity and pitch-black humour, Bad Nature is an incendiary debut novel. Part road trip, part revenge tale, part eco-thriller, it’s ultimately a deft examination of the futility of violence and the eternal possibility of redemption.

Every flame tells a story...

George McGlory has been struggling since the death of his beloved wife, Audrey. But when he witnesses a public health funeral - with no flowers and no mourners - he is inspired to create The Light a Candle Society.

As George and his friends join together to celebrate forgotten lives, their care, compassion, humour and friendship become gifts not only to the people they are remembering, but to each other.

And the kindness of strangers gives them strength to confront the secrets of their own histories, forging joyful and unexpected new connections...

Corsica, 1993. Seventeen-year-old Séverine Guimard knows in her heart that it's only a matter of time before she'll escape this provincial island for Hollywood's glimmering lights. Until then, she'll spend her days listening to "What is Love" on her Walkman, smoking cigarettes, and riding her bike at dusk along the picturesque roads that wind around her parents' gated villa.

That is until three masked men emerge from an idling car, tear her from her bike, duct tape her mouth and wrists, and take her somewhere hidden from prying eyes...

Séverine's face will be plastered all over newspapers and TV, but not for the reason you think.

How does one kidnapped young woman become the face of a revolution?

A transporting exploration of the deep sea, and how our planet’s strangest, most ancient and astonishing creatures have urgent relevance to cutting-edge science today.

Hundred-year-old giant clams, coral kingdoms the size and shape of cities, and jellyfish that glow in the dark: ocean invertebrates are among the oldest and most diverse organisms on Earth, seeming to bend the rules of land-based biology. Although sometimes unseen in the deep, these incredible spineless creatures contain 600 million years of adaptation to problems of disease, energy consumption, nutrition, and defence.

Marine ecologist Dr Drew Harvell takes us diving from Hawaii to the Salish Sea, from the Caribbean to Indonesia, to uncover the incredible underwater ‘superpowers’ of spineless creatures: we meet corals many times stronger than steel or concrete, sponges who create potent chemical compounds to fight off disease, and sea stars who garden the coastlines, keeping all the other nearby species in perfect balance. As our planet changes fast, the biomedical, engineering and energy innovations of these wondrous creatures hold ever more important secrets to our own survival.

The Ocean’s Menagerie is a tale of biological marvels, a story of a woman’s passionate connection to an adventurous career in science and a call to arms to protect the world’s most ancient ecosystems.

From a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian comes the first definitive history of the Western hemisphere, a sweeping five-century narrative of North and South America that redefines our understanding of both continents.

The story of the United States’ unique sense of itself was forged facing south – no less than Latin America’s was indelibly stamped by the looming colossus to the north. In this stunningly original reinterpretation of the New World, Professor Greg Grandin reveals how the Americas emerged from constant, turbulent engagement with each other, shedding new light on well-known historical figures like Bartolomé de las Casas, Simón Bolívar and Woodrow Wilson, as well as lesser-known actors such as the Venezuelan Francisco de Miranda, who almost lost his head in the French Revolution and conspired with Alexander Hamilton to free America from Spain.

America, América traverses half a millennium, from the Spanish Conquest – the greatest mortality event in human history – through the eighteenth-century wars for independence and the Monroe Doctrine, to the coups and revolutions of the twentieth century. This monumental work of scholarship fundamentally changes our understanding of slavery and racism, the rise of universal humanism, and the role of social democracy in staving off extremism. At once comprehensive and accessible, America, América shows how the United States and Latin America together shaped the laws, institutions, and ideals that govern the modern world. Drawing on a vast array of sources, and told with authority and flair, this is a genuinely new history of the New World.

Joernalis en meestersstudent Rachel April se lyk word gevind met ’n steekwond in haar hart. Lesea du Plessis, ’n medestudent, stel ondersoek in. Sy het Rachel se dogtertjie belowe sy sal uitvind wat met haar ma gebeur het.

Dit blyk dat Rachel tydens ’n internskap by die Anglo-Boereoorlogmuseum iets ontdek het. Maar wat kan dit wees?

Gou raak dit duidelik iemand wil keer dat Lesea en haar aanneemboetie die waarheid oor Rachel se moord ontbloot. En nou is hulle self in doodse gevaar.

Further immerses the reader in the world of endurance cycling as well-known former professional cyclist Michael Hutchinson talks to ultra-distance athletes, exercise scientists, nutritionists and psychologists - 'those who've done it and those who understand it'- as he unpicks both the physical and mental demands, attempts to understand the key to successful endurance, and tries not to get himself accidentally killed while riding a frankly terrifyingly long-distance event.

Rarely has there seemed a more confusing time to be a man. This uncertainty has spawned an array of bizarre and harmful underground subcultures, collectively known as the ‘manosphere’, as men search for new forms of belonging.

In Lost Boys, acclaimed journalist James Bloodworth delves into these worlds and asks: what does their emergence say about Western society? Why are so many men susceptible to the sinister beliefs these groups promote? And what can we do about their pernicious encroachment upon our social and political spheres? Along the way, he enlists in a bootcamp for ‘alpha males’, dissects cultural figures including Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate, and accompanies modern day Hugh Hefners as they broadcast their jet-set lifestyles to millions of followers.

Combining compulsive memoir with powerful reporting, Lost Boys is an essential guide to the contradictions in contemporary masculinity.

From the acclaimed author of Foreskin's Lament, a memoir of the author's attempt to escape the biblical story he'd been raised on and his struggle to construct a new story for himself and his family.

Shalom Auslander was raised like a veal in a dysfunctional family in the Orthodox community of Monsey, New York: the son of an alcoholic father; a guilt-wielding mother; and a violent, overbearing God. Now, as he reaches middle age, Auslander begins to suspect that what plagues him is something worse, something he can't so easily escape: a story. The story. One indelibly implanted in him at an early age, a story that told him he is fallen, broken, shameful, disgusting, a story we have all been told for thousands of years, and continue to be told by the religious and secular alike, a story called "Feh."

Yiddish for "Yuck."

FEH follows Auslander's midlife journey to rewrite that story, a journey that involves Phillip Seymour Hoffman, a Pulitzer-winning poet, Job, Arthur Schopenhauer, GHB, Wolf Blitzer, Yuval Noah Harari, and a pastor named Steve in a now-defunct church in Los Angeles.

Can he move from feh to merely meh? Can he even dream of moving beyond that? Auslander's recounting of his attempt to exorcize the story he was raised with-before he implants it onto his children and/or possibly poisons the relationship of the one woman who loves him-isn't sacred. It is more-than-occasionally profane. And like all his work, it is also relentlessly funny, subversively heartfelt, and fearlessly provocative.

In this collection of medical tales, a neurologist reckons with the stories we tell about our brains, and the stories our brains tell us.

A girl believes she has been struck blind for stealing a kiss. A mother watches helplessly as each of her children is replaced by a changeling. A woman is haunted each month by the same four chords of a single song. In neurology, illness is inextricably linked with narrative, the clues to unraveling these mysteries hidden in both the details of a patient's story and the tells of their body.

Stories are etched into the very structure of our brains, coded so deeply that the impulse for storytelling survives and even surges after the most devastating injuries. But our brains are also porous—the stories they concoct shaped by cultural narratives about bodies and illness that permeate the minds of doctors and patients alike. In the history of medicine, some stories are heard, while others—the narratives of women, of Black and brown people, of displaced people, of disempowered people—are too often dismissed.

In The Mind Electric, neurologist Pria Anand reveals—through case study, history, fable, and memoir—all that the medical establishment has overlooked: the complexity and wonder of brains in health and in extremis, and the vast gray area between sanity and insanity, doctor and patient, and illness and wellness, each separated from the next by the thin veneer of a different story.

Moving from the Boston hospital where she treats her patients, to her childhood years in India, to Isla Providencia in the Caribbean and to the Republic of Guinea in West Africa, she demonstrates again and again the compelling paradox at the heart of neurology: that even the most peculiar symptoms can show us something universal about ourselves as humans.

From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Prairie Fires comes a terrifying true-crime history of serial killers in the Pacific Northwest and beyond—a gripping investigation of how a new strain of psychopath emerged out of a toxic landscape of deadly industrial violence.

Caroline Fraser grew up in the shadow of Ted Bundy, the most notorious serial murderer of women in American history, surrounded by his hunting grounds and mountain body dumps, in the brooding landscape of the Pacific Northwest. But in the 1970s and ’80s, Bundy was just one perpetrator amid an uncanny explosion of serial rape and murder across the region. Why so many? Why so weirdly and nightmarishly gruesome? Why the senseless rise and then sudden fall of an epidemic of serial killing?

As Murderland indelibly maps the lives and careers of Bundy and his infamous peers in mayhem—the Green River Killer, the I-5 Killer, the Night Stalker, the Hillside Strangler, even Charles Manson—Fraser’s Northwestern death trip begins to uncover a deeper mystery and an overlapping pattern of environmental destruction. At ground zero in Ted Bundy’s Tacoma stood one of the most poisonous lead, copper, and arsenic smelters in the world, but it was hardly unique in the West. As Fraser’s investigation inexorably proceeds, evidence mounts that the plumes of these smelters not only sickened and blighted millions of lives but also warped young minds, including some who grew up to become serial killers.

A propulsive nonfiction thriller, Murderland transcends true-crime voyeurism and noir mythology, taking readers on a profound quest into the dark heart of the real American berserk.

At eight, Sean Connery saved him from drowning. At thirteen, desperate to hook up with Janis Joplin, he attended his aunt Joan Didion's legendary LA launch party for Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. In his early twenties, he shared a Manhattan apartment with his best friend and soulmate Carrie Fisher while she was filming some sci-fi movie called Star Wars and he was a struggling actor selling popcorn at Radio City Music Hall. A few years later, he produced and starred in the now-iconic film After Hours, directed by Martin Scorsese.

In the midst of it all, Griffin's twenty-two-year-old sister, Dominique, a rising star in Hollywood, was brutally strangled to death by her ex-boyfriend, leading to one of the most infamous public trials of the 1980s. The outcome was a travesty of justice that marked the beginning of their father Dominick Dunne's career as a bestselling author of true crime narratives.

And yet, for all its boldface cast of characters and jaw-dropping scenes, The Friday Afternoon Club is no mere celebrity memoir. It is, down to its bones, a family story that embraces the poignant absurdities and best and worst efforts of its loveable, infuriating, funny and moving characters - its author most of all.

Sexy, swoony and very spicy, the international bestselling sensation, Monica Murphy, is back with an emotionally charged novel bound to set pulses racing . . .

The tables turne when the girl August Lancaster couldn’t stand at Lancaster Prep shows up at the same university he attends.

She is suddenly everywhere.

And is determined to remind him exactly who she is . . .

"I am writing this story without knowing its end: it begins long before I was born and will continue long after I die. I am writing this story to help myself heal and to make you understand."

When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Ukrainian chef Olia Hercules decided it was finally time to tell her story.

Strong Roots is the story of a century in Ukraine told through four generations of one extraordinary family. It takes us from years of Russification, to Olia's grandmother's deportation to snowy wastelands under Stalin, to her Aunt Zhenia's school protest, to her own parents' flight from Ukraine when their town was occupied in 2022.

This is an ode to the land, to ideas of home and belonging, and to family stories and recipes passed down the generations - the tang of sour cherries, the best way to make borsch. It is an account of resilience in the hardest of circumstances.

Strong Roots brims with hope and grief. It lays bare the compromises and betrayals of generations struggling and surviving through war, peace, invasion and exile. It is an uplifting reminder of how much the human spirit can endure when born from a land rich with strong roots.

Have you struggled to get diagnosed, be believed or get the right treatment for endometriosis? This book is for you.

We still don't know what causes endometriosis, and we don't know how to cure it either. What we do know is that it can cause debilitating pain and seriously affect mental health. Endometriosis is not 'just a bad period', it is a whole-body disease which is as common as asthma or diabetes, affecting 1 in 10 women. Yet it is barely covered in medical school, leaving sufferers repeatedly dismissed when trying to access care.

Backed with up-to-date scientific knowledge and interviews with endometriosis specialists and those affected by the condition, Jen Moore gives you all the tools you need to:

• Understand what endometriosis is (and what it is not)
• Deal with the system and get a diagnosis
• Navigate the ins and outs of surgery
• Cope with physical and mental pain
• Fight for better endometriosis care

This beacon of hope is your go-to guide to endometriosis, getting the care you deserve and finally feeling seen and heard.

A striving for national self-sufficiency is shaping up to be one of the greatest forces of twenty-first century geopolitics - Exile Economics is a provocative warning about the risks of abandoning globalisation and how isolationism weakens the global economy.

The dangerous race for self-sufficiency has begun. Be warned.

Nations are turning away from each other. Faith in globalisaton has been fatally undermined by the pandemic, the energy crisis, surging trade frictions and swelling great power rivalry. A new vision is vying to replace what we've known for many decades. This vision - Exile Economics - entails a rejection of interdependence, a downgrading of multilateral collaboration and a striving for greater national self-sufficiency. The supporters of this new order argue it will establish genuine security, prosperity and peace. But is this promise achievable? Or a seductive delusion?

Through the stories of globally traded commodities - from silicon to steel and from soybeans to solar panels - economics journalist Ben Chu illustrates the intricate web of interdependence that has come to bind nations together - and underlines the dangers of this new push to isolationism. Exile Economics is an essential guide to this new world in all its promise and peril.

A brilliant new voice in science writing shows why playfulness and curiosity are the key to science.

Why would anyone research how elephants pee? Or study worms who tie themselves into a communal knot? Or quantify the squishability of a cockroach? It all sounds pointless, silly, or even disgusting.

Maybe it is. But in The Salmon Cannon and the Levitating Frog, Carly Anne York shows how unappreciated, overlooked, and simply curiosity-driven science has led to breakthroughs big and small. Got wind power? You might have humpback whales to thank. Know anything about particle physics? Turns out there is a ferret close to the heart of it all. And if you want to keep salmon around, be thankful for that cannon! The research itself can seem bizarre. But it drives our economy. And what’s more, this stuff is simply cool.

York invites readers to appreciate the often unpredictable journey of scientific exploration, highlighting that the heart of science lies in the relentless pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. Emphasizing the hard work of the people behind the discoveries, this is an accessible, story-driven book that shows how important and exciting it is to simply let curiosity run wild.

IT'S NOT YOU. IT'S YOUR BIOLOGY.

Modern society is plagued by health epidemics: obesity, record levels of loneliness, increasing mental health problems and various forms of addiction. From the outside, all these issues might seem unrelated. But a single phenomenon actually ties them all together: superstimuli.

Superstimuli are exaggerated, unnatural versions of things we have evolved to want and need such as food, sex and social recognition. This hard wired evolutionary response is why we binge on fake ultra-processed food, lust after airbrushed people online, and struggle to stop scrolling on social media, even when it makes us feel bad. Our lack of control isn't because we are weak. It's because powerful companies spend billions creating superstimuli that manipulate our biology for profit, leaving us unhealthy and unhappy as a consequence.

Super Stimulated shows how we can resist this hijacking of our natural instincts, recognise superstimulus traps, and take control of our bad habits to live longer, healthier lives.

Do you ever feel like your brain is running on dial-up in a fiber-optic world?

In his 20s, Dave Asprey did too. He battled debilitating brain fog and chronic fatigue syndrome, frustrated by his broken brain. Determined to upgrade his “MeatOS,” fix his brain, and biohack his biology to live past the age of 180, Dave embarked on a lifelong quest to push the boundaries of human potential, including running a neuroscience center for entrepreneurs for over a decade. Now, he's sharing his mind-blowing secrets in Heavily Meditated, blending cutting-edge science, a sprinkle of woo, and ancient wisdom from around the globe.

This book is your ticket to unlocking altered states of consciousness and tapping into unlimited energy, happiness, and inner peace. Dive into breathwork, harness sexual energy, safely induce pain, explore psychedelics, and geek out with EEG and neurofeedback. Discover the magic of the Reset Process, the core program from Dave's renowned neurofeedback center, to remove the triggers stealing your power. These methods are your toolkit to enhance cognitive performance, biohack your MeatOS, boost productivity, and unlock your hidden potential.

A tour of Tudor England through the coroner's reports of ordinary people's various grizzly fatal accidents. A Horrible History for adults by leading Oxford historians.

How did ordinary people live in Tudor England? This unique history unearths the ways they died to find out.

Uncovering thousands of coroners' reports, An Accidental History of Tudor England explores the history of everyday life, and everyday death, in a world far from the intrigues of Hampton Court Palace, Shakespeare's plots and the Spanish Armada. Here, farming, building and travel were dangerous. Fruit trees killed more people than guns, and sheep killed about the same number as coalmines. Men stabbed themselves playing football and women drowned in hundreds fetching water. Going to church had its dangers, especially when it came to bell-ringing, archery practice was perilous and haystacks claimed numerous victims. Restless animals roamed the roads which contained some potholes so deep men could drown, and drown they did.

From bear attacks in north Oxford to a bowls-on-ice-incident on the Thames, this book uses a remarkable trove of sources and stories to put common folk back into the big picture of Tudor England, bringing the reality of their world to life as never before.

Do big government debts and fast rates of adding to them threaten our collective well-being? In this groundbreaking analysis, Ray Dalio, one of the greatest investors of our time and the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Principles, shares the reasons behind his fears for the US debt markets, answering some of the most important market and economic questions we now face: Are there limits to debt growth? Can a big, important reserve currency country like the US really go broke? Is there such a thing as a 'Big Debt Cycle' that can tell us when to worry about debt and what to do about it?

For decades, politicians, policymakers and investors have debated these questions, but the Big Debt Cycle that helps answer them is not talked about or well understood. With the US debt issue coming to a head, Dalio’s How Countries Go Broke provides the first-ever detailed analysis of the Big Debt Cycle, explaining its implications and offering a surprisingly straightforward solution to getting debt problems like those faced by the US under control.

Dalio has built his career as a leading global macro investor by studying the patterns of history to develop unconventional perspectives on what’s happening in markets and economies today. It was this approach that led him, in the years leading up to the 2008 Great Financial Crisis, to study the Great Depression and other past big debt crises and use what he learned to navigate the turbulent markets successfully. By looking closely at thirty-five cases over the past 100 years when governments have gone broke and studying the mechanics behind them, Dalio has developed a first-of-its-kind template for what to watch for and what to do when the threat is as significant as his measures show that it now is. He has discussed this template with treasury secretaries and central bankers from around the world and is now sharing it with the public to help bring urgent attention to the big risks the US and a number of other countries face – and to explain how to avoid the worst-case scenario.

An extraordinary love story and a captivating novel about the power of memory and imagination.

Flanders 1922. After serving as a soldier in the Great War, Noon Merckem has lost his memory and lives in a psychiatric asylum. Countless women, responding to a newspaper ad, visit him there in the hope of finding their spouse who vanished in battle. One day a woman, Julienne, appears and recognises Noon as her husband, the photographer Amand Coppens, and takes him home against medical advice. But their miraculous reunion doesn’t turn out the way that Julienne wants her envious friends to believe. Only gradually do the two grow close, and Amand’s biography is pieced together on the basis of Julienne’s stories about him. But how can he be certain that she’s telling the truth?

In The Remembered Soldier, Anjet Daanje immerses us in the psyche of a war-traumatised man who has lost his identity. When Amand comes to doubt Julienne’s word, the reader is caught up in a riveting spiral of confusion that only the greatest works of literature can achieve.