Max Lurie’s navel-gazing podcast about his life has become an unexpected success. But its embellishments and inventions are starting to leak into his everyday life.

As Max tries to navigate the grey areas between fact and fiction, things begin to spin out of control. He juggles real and imagined girlfriends, an illegally procured firearm, an unpredictable friendship with a homeless schizophrenic, his acerbic immigrant producer, his dying father, his famous childhood sweetheart, an unlikely romantic entanglement and his critical and growing audience. Can he keep all of these balls in the air and finally bring them safely to rest?

This story takes a deep and satiric dive into the worlds we imagine for ourselves and the lives we actually live, particularly in a time when our real and digital personas intersect and merge in chaotic ways. Free Association casts a steely and comic eye on the great and small concerns of being human: the chances we take and miss, the pain of not fitting in, the fragility of the psyche, the unpredictability of love, the dull certainty of death, the importance of listening to others and the careening craziness of it all.

“Crypto”, a loose term that means many things to different people, only entered public consciousness within the last five years or so, now evident by the volume of public discussion, commentary and analysis spread across every conceivable media outlet. It’s Mine digs into the history and concept of “ownership”, which ecosystems nurture it, and where we are now.

Filled with anecdotes, observations and interviews, the book takes an entertaining and accessible look at how Bitcoin made its mark, how its technology is being re-purposed to enable a revolution, and (in non-technical terms) how it all works.

It explores how these new crypto “life-forms” will interact with the rest of the virtual and physical world, while making some very rich and some very poor.

Joelle Jesson is 40 and single and now suddenly unemployed. After a long and distinguished career as a fiction editor at powerful publishing companies, her future is extinguished by a world that no longer cares as much for books as it does for faster and more superficial digital pleasures.

Buddy Rappaport, the young, glamorous new CEO of her famed publisher, CrossMedia, is tasked with letting her go. Soon after, he is found dead at his desk, with no apparent cause. Joelle’s plot instincts light up. Was he killed? And if so, why? Did he commit suicide? A lifetime of massaging the plots of stories leaves her obsessed with getting to the bottom of his death. Is it the dark and taciturn brother, Cubby, a near-unknown artist painting strange canvases in his small apartment? He is a dead ringer for Buddy, volcanically sexy, but so different to his charismatic and successful younger brother.

Or is it the handsome and cynical LAPD detective, Corelli, who accosts Joelle at Buddy’s funeral, trying to get her to read his first manuscript for a novel, a murder story eerily reminiscent of what happened in the corner office of the company where she spent so many years?

Or perhaps the deranged and talentless loner, Thron, desperate for fame and fortune, trying to foist an absurd science fiction manuscript on all and sundry, driven mad by constant rejection and derision, stalking elite publishing executives with a gun in his pocket?

Leaving Word is a literary mystery; a story of homicide; a comic and probing look at our need for stories; a satire about fame, fortune, art and books; a love story and one woman’s quest to find meaning in a chaotic world.

The first book for a popular audience on the transformative, democratising technology of 'DeFi'.

After over a decade of Bitcoin, which has now moved beyond lore and hype into an increasingly robust star in the firmament of global assets, a new and more important question has arisen. What happens beyond Bitcoin? The answer is decentralised finance - 'DeFi'.

Tech and finance experts Steven Boykey Sidley and Simon Dingle argue that DeFi - which enables all manner of financial transactions to take place directly, person to person, without the involvement of financial institutions - will redesign the cogs and wheels in the engines of trust, and make the remarkable rise of Bitcoin look quaint by comparison. It will disrupt and displace fine and respectable companies, if not entire industries.

Sidley and Dingle explain how DeFi works, introduce the organisations and individuals that comprise the new industry, and identify the likely winners and losers in the coming revolution.