As the clock strikes the end of the war, the time begins to turn towards a new age — the one we call now.

This shift does not happen overnight, from one day to the next; instead, the world vibrates for a number of years. People try to find their way back to homes that are no longer there, or on to an uncertain future across the sea. Some run from their deeds, and most get away. Among the millions in flight across Europe looking for a new home in 1947 is Elisabeth Åsbrink’s father.

In 1947, production begins of the Kalashnikov, Christian Dior creates the New Look, Simone de Beauvoir writes The Second Sex, the first actual computer bug is discovered, the CIA is set up, a clockmaker’s son draws up the plan that remains the goal of jihadists to this day, and a UN Committee is given four months to find a solution to the problem of Palestine.

In 1947, Elisabeth Åsbrink chronicles the creation of the modern world, as the forces that will go on to govern all our lives during the next 70 years first make themselves known.

From the bestselling and always-prescient author of Listen, Liberal comes a bold indictment of our chronic obsession with creativity and innovation, showing how these beloved ideas have come to dominate our political and economic conversation, all while serving to mask inequality and protect elite interests.

Innovation and creativity have been the watchwords of progress for decades, used by business thinkers, tech gurus, military strategists, educators, and urban planners to describe the virtues that set prosperous modern societies apart from all others. Countries that honour creative people are dynamic and productive, our authorities tell us, while those that don’t are condemned to mediocrity and stagnation. In his new book, Thomas Frank blasts these received ideas apart, offering a bold account of the way that creativity and innovation have been used as a kind of ideological cover for policies that reinforce our new class system.

Frank uncovers the insidious effects of centring innovation and creativity in rhetoric while, in practice, nurturing exactly the opposite. In the name of these noble goals, he shows, our leaders have reoriented our societies around white-collar knowledge work, cut taxes on the wealthy, deregulated banks, off-shored manufacturing, reoriented cities, and destroyed what is truly creative about human achievement.

Deeply original, marked by Frank’s signature brilliance and acerbic wit, The Creativity Con is a troubling X-ray of post-war business and political cultures — and a crushing indictment of the clichés that have undergirded our many failures.

It’s never too late to rewrite your own story.

For years, Leila Whittaker has been the mediator in her family. She smoothes ruffled feathers between her sons; endures the volatile moods of their father, the acclaimed Australian artist Ken Black; and even swallows the bitter pill of Ken’s endless affairs. All this, for the quiet hum of creative freedom her marriage provides. Or so she tells herself.

When Ken dies, leaving his artist’s estate to their two sons, and the pointed amount of sixty-nine thousand dollars to his muse, Anita, Leila decides she’s had enough. It’s time to seek some peace (and pleasure) of her own …

Diving, Falling is an elegant, exhilarating journey through grief, betrayal, and the intoxicating rediscovery of joy. Ripe with wickedly wry observations, unashamedly bold and sexy, it examines the calculations and sacrifices women make to keep the peace, escape their pasts, and find the agency to pursue their own passions.

A young man is gripped by one fear: that he’ll lose his mind.

With depression, alcoholism, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia spread across his family tree, the odds are not in his favour. So, he does what any analytically minded man might do: he tries to calculate the statistical probability of his own madness. What follows is a restless, darkly comic journey — from New York to Paris to Vienna — as he tries to outrun a fate that seems written into his DNA, only to end up working as a psychologist inside the very institution he’s spent his life fearing.

There, surrounded by stories that echo his own family’s, he begins to see with a new, hard-earned clarity. In this bestselling German debut, a potent blend of memoir and fiction, Engler unravels a compassionate tale of reconciliation in which the protagonist is forced to confront a question he has avoided all his life: What is normal?

This powerful collaboration between Gloria Ray Karlmark and Elisabeth Åsbrink tells Gloria’s story as one of the Little Rock Nine for the first time.

In 1957, armed white soldiers prevented fourteen-year-old Gloria Ray Karlmark from entering Little Rock Central High School in Arkansas. The governor refused to allow her and eight other black teenagers into the all-white school. ‘That day my childhood ended,’ Gloria says today.

The Little Rock Nine, as they came to be known, were the first to act on the 1954 Supreme Court decision ruling school segregation as unconstitutional. Arkansas’ violent resistance forced President Eisenhower to deploy federal troops to escort the nine black children to school each day.

The incident became world news and a Cold War flashpoint, exposing American racism to the world, and the Little Rock Nine are now civil rights icons. But the price they paid was devastating. They endured harassment, death threats, and violence. Their families and supporters suffered. The governor ultimately closed all public schools rather than allow integration, affecting thousands of students.

Gloria Ray tells the story of that transformative year, and the deep roots of American racism and slavery from which it grew. Åsbrink’s eloquent narration and distinctive voice illuminate key moments of conflict and inequality by masterfully weaving together personal and national history.

In the summer of 1992, patients at a veterans’ hospital in mid-Missouri began dying under suspicious circumstances — but the institution meant to protect them was busy protecting itself. Three decades on, Jake Adelstein comes home to his native Missouri to take up the case his father never stopped investigating.

Strange things were happening at the Harry S. Truman Memorial Veterans’ Hospital. Patients who should have gone home were never making it out. And in Ward 4 East, the loudspeakers kept crackling with an announcement that told the staff someone was about to die: Code Blue.

When staff raised concerns, administrators found a suspect — a nurse. They acted quickly. But they didn’t call the police. Instead, they went after the people trying to tell the truth. The nurse moved on to new jobs. Death followed.

This is the story of serial killings in a college town, the cover-up, and the devastating ripple effects of a crime that went unpunished. It is a story of grieving families, courtroom battles. law enforcement agencies that fumbled the case, and whistleblowers who should have been heroes but were treated like criminals. At the centre of it all: the hospital pathologist who started the investigation and asked his son to finish it.

For the first time in thirty years, Jake Adelstein — the author of Tokyo Vice — has returned to his hometown of Columbia, Missouri. Together with his daughter, Beni, and Amy Yoshida-Plambeck, they turn up the heat on a very cold case in a quest for real justice.

A genre-defying feminist gothic novel blending Indonesian folklore, Islamic mysticism, horror, and political reckoning.

International literary sensation Intan Paramaditha returns with her most ambitious and haunting work to date. The novel opens with a devastating act: the youngest of three sisters becomes a suicide bomber. In the aftermath, her surviving siblings are forced to confront the violent, buried truths of their family history. Their search leads them to long-concealed secrets, and to the prophecies of their grandmother, whose shadowy wisdom has shaped their fates.

Set across Indonesia, the United States, and Australia, the novel explores class divides, sisterhood, migration, shame, abandonment, and the politics of care — all through a ghostly, atmospheric lens that draws on Asian folktales and occult traditions.

With its blend of political urgency, mythic resonance, and psychological depth, Night of a Thousand Hells is a singular contribution to global feminist literature.

Minor is the desiring body that runs, rises, gravitates towards larger, brighter, more dazzling bodies, that bestows on other bodies the status of suns and planets, fires to be orbited, the reason for everything. There is no centre of the universe except the one we invent for ourselves.

Jonathan is twenty years old, gay, and full of life. He’s set out to escape the insignificance of his suburban home, to give himself instead and forever to the real city, Milan, where he hopes also to find love.

But when Jonathan finds love in all its messy, complicated, sexy reality, it is not enough. He has escaped the place and people of his childhood, but can he escape the man raised by those people and in that place, the man he has grown up to be?

Panic attacks, phobias, social anxiety, obsessions, compulsions — anxiety affects us all. Trapped by our worries and fears, we often find ourselves distanced from what truly matters. Yet the solutions are closer than we think.

Physician, psychotherapist, and expert in cutting-edge therapies (CBT, ACT, and more), Dr Philippe Presles reveals the root causes of anxiety and demystifies the simple, effective techniques that can help us break free from its grip once and for all.

In just six sessions, you’ll not only uncover the biological mechanisms behind your fears, but also learn how to step back from them, reshape them, and ultimately take full control of your mind.

Both practical and engaging, this accessible approach empowers you to reclaim authority over the anxieties that have held you back for too long. With newfound confidence in your abilities and aspirations, you’ll finally take the reins of your own future.

A gripping exploration of a mother-daughter relationship against the gruelling, magnificent backdrop of a rapidly changing China.

When 52-year-old Chunxiang leaves her rural Shaanxi province for the first time for the mega-city of Shenzhen, she moves into her adult daughter Xiaoman’s cramped apartment and takes a gruelling job cleaning a luxury mega-mall. Suddenly thrust back together, mother and daughter begin to clash.

But as Xiaoman watches her mother endure rigid corporate micromanagement and arduous, endless labour, she begins to document her mother’s backbreaking daily reality, pulling back the curtain on China’s ageing, invisible migrant workforce. Together, mother and daughter learn to navigate a new reality, mending the deep roots of their relationship and complex history.

Deeply moving, this bestselling literary phenomenon is both a powerful critique of the human cost behind an economic miracle and a poignant tribute to the unsung, essential hands that keep our modern world spinning.

From the award-winning author of Pink Slime comes a hypnotic novel of rage, solitude, and metamorphosis, set on a mountain where the living and the dead refuse to stay silent.

Winner of the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize

A woman lives alone on the slope of a mist-covered mountain, hired by a man she has never seen to patrol the boundary between the cloud forest and the quarry that is slowly devouring it. In her notebooks, she records her solitary days, her fierce desires, the language of her landscape, and the violence that shaped her childhood.

One day, a body appears in her yard. And then another, and another. As the dead repeat their silent message, the woman finds in the act of tending to their remains an answer that escaped her among the living, and she begins to form an intimate bond with the mountain that shelters her, mirrors her, and demands to be heard.

At once earthy and visionary, tender and ferocious, The Mountain Woman is a novel about the violences women inherit and the forms of life that persist in the ruins. In prose of rare intensity, Fernanda Trías gives voice to a world beyond the human, where care can be an act of rebellion and language must be broken open to tell the story of the harm we do to ourselves, others, and the world we love.

A clear-eyed manual for building a life of meaning in the chaos of the modern world.

So you’ve realised life is meaningless. Religion is fake, your job is pointless, society is a charade, and everyone else is just pretending things are fine when, in reality, existential despair is the only logical reaction to any of this. You’re staring into the abyss — but author and spiritual director Britt Hartley is here to pull you back from the edge.

Hartley has travelled deep into the void of nihilism herself after deconstructing her faith and every other belief system she could think of, and she knows firsthand how to rebuild a meaningful life from scratch without sugar-coating or toxic positivity. In this book, she shares the tools of philosophy, spirituality, psychology, and creativity that have helped her and countless of her clients rediscover how to live. You’ll learn how to:

• Lovingly confront the fear of death, meaninglessness, and loneliness
• Shift to a perspective based on experience, play, and quiet joy
• Unearth the core values already guiding your inner compass
• Connect deeply with other humans on their own unique journey
• And much more, all without being asked to put on a smile or believe anything unbelievable

Yes, maybe it’s true that everything is stupid, the world is on fire, and nothing matters. But as Hartley demonstrates, that only means we have the opportunity to define our own lives in the ways that matter most — and move forward with hope and purpose.

From the author of Diving, Falling comes a gripping family drama and a sharp examination of inheritance.

Once there were three sisters who lived in a house on a cliff, with their mother, Adeline, and their overbearing father, Winston. Now the Baruni daughters — Penelope, Laronda, and Alexis — are adults, and they’ve provoked their father’s wrath by signing over to Adeline the ownership of that seaside home, which he’d always intended to keep from her.

Desires shift, a pandemic looms, and the climate is changing. Penelope’s husband, Jim, whose marine research is eroding his belief in the future, is looking for new love. Laronda’s children are growing up and away from her, and she and her husband are growing apart. And Alexis, the sensitive one, does her best to carry on, despite the drama that threaten to upend them all.

Storm Tide is a portrait of a family living on the edge of land and in the turbulence of flux. With shades of King Lear, Mirmohamadi expertly explores the connections, chosen and unchosen, that keep us together, and tie us to the natural world.

The public execution of Ringo Starr is the first demonstration of power by the aliens whose spacecraft hangs over Britain and seals off the country from the outside world.

It’s the 1960s and, while the aliens linger overhead, London’s streets have become a feral playground for warring factions of fascists and communists. The odious teenage Rat runs a rooming house that is also a brothel and a crash pad for a volatile gang of neo-fascist thugs known as The Lot. But the house’s fragile equilibrium implodes with the arrival of his cousin, Frijja. Delicate, but radiating icy detachment, she systematically dismantles the gang’s primitive power dynamics. Her presence ignites a dangerous, obsessive fixation in Connor, The Lot’s most ruthless enforcer.

When rising violence forces them to flee their home in a stolen helicopter, the three embark on a desperate trek across a decaying England and the strange new communities that have sprung up amongst the wreckage. As the trio fight to survive and for dominance between themselves, their uneasy alliance unravels toward a shocking, haunting conclusion.

Bitingly, darkly funny, satirical A Sweet, Sweet Summer is one of the great lost classics of postwar British fiction, now available to readers again for the first time in many decades.

The story of how a vast fortune acquired in the Gilded Age has moved into the darkest spaces of the American political system, now bankrolling Donald Trump, the administration’s anti-immigration machine, and conservative judges and right-wing think tanks.

Andrew Mellon built one of the largest fortunes in American history, served as Treasury secretary for three US presidents, and amassed the greatest private art collection in the world. He bent the nation’s tax code and financial institutions to his will, clearing the way for his family and other wealthy industrialists to amass unprecedented sums and to become immensely influential.

There were Mellons on the Gatsby-esque Long Island estates and polo fields of the Roaring Twenties, and in the viewing box with Hitler at the Nuremberg rallies. They helped build the nascent CIA in the World War II intelligence services during the London Blitz. Modern-day Mellons can be found in the secretive world of Washington power brokers.

Now, as Kevin Carey reports, some of Mellon’s descendants have been using their wealth to help move presidential elections and to reshape American institutions to favour ultra-right-wing interests. Between them, Timothy Mellon, Andrew Mellon’s last living grandson; Andrew Mellon’s grand-niece, Cordelia May; and Cordelia’s brother, Richard Mellon Scaife, have spent vast sums funding the campaigns of Robert F. Kennedy Jr, Donald Trump, and key elements of Trumpism and the MAGA movement.

Shadow Dynasty tells a riveting tale of what colossal amounts of money have done to people as individuals and what they are doing to American society as a whole.

From the New York Times bestselling author of What an Owl Knows, The Genius of Birds, and The Bird Way, here is the first, groundbreaking investigation about how female birds live.

Recent studies about female birds upend everything we thought we knew about birds. Female Northern Cardinals learn their songs three times faster than males do. Female House Wrens can be even more aggressive than their male counterparts. Female birds in general also often have entirely different migratory patterns and are quicker to adapt to climate change.

Jennifer Ackerman grew up with the conventional wisdom found in field guides and bird books. According to them, females were drab and passive. They didn’t sing. They were good mothers, sitting faithfully on their eggs, tending and feeding their young. But it turns out that nothing could be further from the truth. Female birds are both more like males than we thought, and less like them, with radically different ways of living and surviving than their male counterparts.

Why have we gotten things so wrong? It is important that we find out, for, as Ackerman writes, ‘conservation planning has long been aimed at protecting male-dominated habitats’, and some female birds have lost almost twice as much territory as males over the past few decades.

Bird lovers will receive no better gift than this extraordinary chance to fly higher and further than was ever possible before, to see all birds, and then to save them, too.

The brilliant debut collection from the author of the internationally bestselling Colony.

‘This I knew: that the whole thing would end in disaster, but I couldn’t tear myself away from standing in that light. It was so warm there, in the light.’

This critically acclaimed Swedish bestseller, published in English for the first time, introduces a cast of strange, loveable characters, moving through life in ways that defy expectation.

Norlin’s stories explore longing and recognition, cult films and road trips, hopeless punk bands and nights that stretch towards dawn. Funny, surprising, and quietly profound, they reveal the strange, surreal, and tender moments hidden within ordinary lives.

A new dawn of animal linguistics, by a modern-day Doctor Dolittle.

For centuries we believed that language was humanity’s defining gift, and that bird calls were no more than an expression of emotion. Then one young Japanese scientist stepped into a forest and began to listen.

Through patience, curiosity, and a series of inventive, handmade experiments, Toshitaka Suzuki eventually revealed that Japanese tits combine over twenty ‘words’ and are able to use grammar and syntax, displaying the cognitive building blocks of language and upending everything we thought we knew about animal intelligence.

Part scientific detective story, part memoir of a life spent in forests, I Can Understand the Language of Birds follows Toshitaka Suzuki’s journey from teenage birdwatcher to the researcher who set up the world’s first laboratory specifically devoted to animal linguistics.

Illustrated by the author, and filled with delight, humour, and infectious enthusiasm, this is a book about opening our ears to wonder all around us.

From the battle for equal pay, to LGBTQIA+ rights and the fight against sexual violence, women footballers have become some of the most effective gender equality campaigners in the world — not by choice, but out of necessity, because they are trying to play the game they love on an unequal playing field.

After years of toiling in obscurity, women footballers around the world have broken through to the mainstream, pulling in billions of spectators, scooping up record quantities of prize money, and landing major sponsorship deals. Once derided as playing a lesser form of the beautiful game, players like Sam Kerr, Lauren James, Khadija Shaw, and Aitana Bonmatí are today some of the most respected athletes on the planet.

That doesn’t mean that the playing field is level — far from it. Men still out-earn women by a factor of four to one in international competitions and, as the whole world saw when former Spanish football federation president Luis Rubiales forcibly kissed Jenni Hermoso during the medal ceremony of the 2023 World Cup final, players are as vulnerable to sexual violence as women and gender minorities everywhere. This is where the paradox lies. Women footballers are more successful than ever, but the game they play remains largely hostile to them. Yet such conditions have led footballers to become some of the most prominent and effective gender equality campaigners in the world. By striving to be the best at what they do, these athletes have shed light on some of the world’s most pernicious gender gaps — and showed how to close them.

The Equalisers tells the story of how, despite the best efforts of the men who run it, football has become a global laboratory for feminist activism.

The defining book of the dawning age of climate revolt — armed with the latest science and buttressed by ecological models, theories of political change, philosophies of degrowth, and narratives of unforgettable characters.

Rebels Against Oblivion tells the story of people around the world who believe that techno-industrial capitalism is not sustainable in the long run, and that radical change is required to right the course of humanity so that we learn to live at last within the limits of our finite Earth. The rebels profiled include:

• climate disobedients in the UK such as Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil, who blockade streets, highways, and airports, and pay the price with draconian prison sentences;
• direct actionists putting their bodies on the line to protect farmland in France, where the state serves big-money agricultural interests against the rights and wellbeing of citizens;
• eco-saboteurs who go underground to attack the property of nature-ravaging corporations; and
• Indigenous tribespeople in Peru, India, and the western US who refuse to bow before capital and profit, occupying their threatened sacred land in immoveable masses.

As he takes readers through the riveting drama of the rebels’ surprising victories and manifold defeats, the ultimate question that Christopher Ketcham seeks to answer is the one that should be on all our minds: will climate chaos and ecological breakdown lead to authoritarianism and full-blown climate fascism? Or will we have radical democracy that maximises justice and equity, despite the collapse of the biophysical underpinnings of modern society?