French Children Don't Throw Food: Parenting Secrets from Paris by Pamela Druckerman

How do the French manage to raise well-behaved children and have a life?

What British parent hasn't noticed, on visiting France, how polite and civilised French children are, compared to their own? They don't cause havoc in restaurants, they always say 'bonjour' politely to adults, and they never throw tantrums in supermarkets. Why is it normal for French babies to sleep through the night by two or three months? And how do their mothers always manage to look so sexy, cool and chic?

New Yorker Pamela Druckerman never imagined she would end up in a Paris apartment with an English husband and a baby, followed in quick succession by twins. She discovered that in France mothers do things differently - and often better. So she set about investigating the secrets of parenting a la francaise. The results is this funny, helpful and informative book.

Hardback £15.00

Stop What You're Doing and Read This!

In any 24 hours there might be sleeping, eating, kids, parents, friends, lovers, work, school, travel, deadlines, emails, phone calls, Facebook, Twitter, the news, the TV, Playstation, music, movies, sport, responsibilities, passions, desires, dreams.

Why should you stop what you're doing and read a book?

In the ten essays in this book some of our finest authors and passionate advocates from the worlds of science, publishing, technology and social enterprise tell us about the experience of reading, why access to books should never be taken forgranted, how reading transforms our brains, and how literature can save lives. In any 24 hours there are so many demands on your time and attention - make books one of them.

Paperback £4.99

Half a Wife: The Working Family's Guide to Getting Life Back by Gaby Hinsliff

For most families, it remains the ultimate dilemma: how to balance a happy, healthy family life with the demands and rewards of work. When Gaby Hinsliff realised that she couldn't continue to work 60-hour weeks, spend time with her child and expect to stay happily married, there was only one solution. She quit, and decided to start again from scratch.

Half a Wife tells the story of that leap into the dark and proposes positive, practical solutions for piecing together what at times can seem like an impossible jigsaw. It encourages working parents to rethink traditional set ups - at home, at work, in relationships - to the mutual benefit of the whole family. The result? A much more egalitarian family life, where both partners can work if they want to, both share the care and both get back a little bit of a life as a result.

Based on personal experience but also drawing on new thinking from politics, psychology, anthropology and even architecture, Half a Wife is a guide for guilt-torn parents who are teetering on the edge, but it is also a wake-up call to opinion leaders. It is essential - and uplifting - reading for anyone who feels the visceral pull of home, but also the lure of meaningful work.

Paperback £12.99

To a Mountain in Tibet by Colin Thubron

Mount Kailas is the most sacred of the world's mountains - holy to one fifth of humanity. Isolated beyond the central Himalayas, it is claimed by myth to be the source of the universe created from cosmic waters and the mind of Brahma.

Its summit has never been scaled, but for centuries the mountain has been ritually circled by Hindu and Buddhist pilgrims. Colin Thubron joins these pilgrims, after an arduous trek from Nepal, through the high passes of Tibet, to the magical lakes beneath the slopes of Kailas itself.

This haunting and beautiful travel book links Colin Thubron's sympathetic intuition with the force and poetry of his descriptive writing. He talks to secluded villagers and to monks in their decaying monasteries; he tells the stories of exiles and of eccentric explorers from the West.

Yet he is also walking on a pilgrimage of his own. Having recently witnessed the death of the last of his family, his trek around the great mountain awakes an inner landscape of love and grief, restoring precious fragments of his own past.

Paperback £8.99

A Short History of Western Thought by Stephen Trombley

For the reader who has lain awake fretting over his tenuous grasp of the Aristotelian syllogism, or the ontological argument for the existence of God, or the nature of Kant's categorical imperative; or who simply struggles to tell his Frege from his Feuerbach, his Husserl from his Heidegger, his Saussure from his Sartre...- help is finally at hand.

That help comes in the comfortingly accessible form of Stephen Trombley's A Short History of Western Thought, which outlines the 2,500-year history of European ideas from the philosophers of Classical Antiquity to the thinkers of today, No major representative of any significant strand of Western thought escapes Trombley's attention: the Christian Scholastic theologians of the Middle Ages, the great philosophers of the Enlightenment, the German idealists from Kant to Hegel; the utilitarians Bentham and Mill; the transcendentalists Emerson and Thoreau; Kierkegaard and the existentialists; the analytic philosophers Russell, Moore, Whitehead and Wittgenstein; and - last but not least - the four shapers-in-chief of our modern world: the philosopher, historian and political theorist Karl Marx; the naturalist Charles Darwin, proposer of the theory of evolution; Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis; and the theoretical physicist Albert Einstein, begetter of the special and general theories of relativity and founder of post-Newtonian physics.

A masterly distillation of two-and-a-half millenia of intellectual history, A Short History of Western Thought is a readable and entertaining crash course in Western philosophy. It is required reading for students of any field of humanities, whether autodidacts or undertaking formal courses of study.

Hardback £14.99

The Social Animal: A Story of How Success Happens by David Brooks

This is the happiest story you will ever read. It's about two people who led wonderfully fulfilling lives. The odd thing was, they weren't born geniuses. They had no extraordinary gifts. Nobody would have picked them out at a young age and said they were destined for greatness. How did they do it?

Paperback £8.99

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

Based on more than forty interviews with Jobs conducted over two years – as well as interviews with more than a hundred family members, friends, adversaries, competitors, and colleagues – this book chronicles the rollercoaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing.

At a time when societies around the world are trying to build digital-age economies, Jobs stands as the ultimate icon of inventiveness and applied imagination. He knew that the best way to create value in the twenty-first-century was to connect creativity with technology, so he built a company where leaps of the imagination were combined with remarkable feats of engineering.

Although Jobs cooperated with this book, he asked for no control over what was written nor even the right to read it before it was published. He put nothing off limits and instead encouraged the people he knew to speak honestly. “I've done a lot of things I'm not proud of, such as getting my girlfriend pregnant when I was twenty-three and the way I handled that,” he said. “But I don't have any skeletons in my closet that can't be allowed out.”

Jobs speaks candidly, sometimes brutally so, about the people he worked with and competed against. Likewise, his friends, foes, and colleagues provide an unvarnished view of the passions, demons, perfectionism, desires, artistry, devilry, and obsession for control that shaped his approach to business and the innovative products that resulted.

Jobs could drive those around him to fury and despair. But his personality and products were all interrelated, just as Apple's hardware and software tended to be, as if part of an integrated system. His tale is thus both instructive and cautionary, filled with lessons about innovation, character, leadership, and values.

Hardback £25.00

Lunch in Paris by Elizabeth Bard

Part love story, part wine-splattered cookbook, Lunch in Paris is a deliciously tart, forthright and funny story of falling in love with a Frenchman and moving to the world's most famous romantic city - not the Hollywood version, but the real Paris, a heady mix of blood sausage, pains au chocolats and irregular verbs.

From gutting her first fish (with a little help from Jane Austen) to discovering the French version of Death by Chocolate, Elizabeth Bard finds that learning to cook and building a new life have a lot in common. Peppered with recipes, this mouth-watering love story is the perfect treat for anyone who has ever suspected that lunch in Paris could change thier life.

Paperback £8.99

Why be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson

In 1985 Jeanette Winterson's first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, was published. It tells the story of a young girl adopted by Pentecostal parents. The girl is supposed to grow up and be a missionary. Instead she falls in love with a woman. Disaster.

Written when Jeanette was only twenty-five, her novel went on to win the Whitbread First Novel award, become an international bestseller and inspire an award-winning BBC television adaptation.

Oranges was semi-autobiographical. Mrs Winterson, a thwarted giantess, loomed over that novel and its author's life. When Jeanette finally left her home, at sixteen, because she was in love with a woman, Mrs Winterson asked her: why be happy when you could be normal?

This book is the story of a life's work to find happiness. It is a book full of stories: about a girl locked out of her home, sitting on the doorstep all night; about a tyrant in place of a mother, who has two sets of false teeth and a revolver in the duster drawer, waiting for Armageddon; about growing up in an northern industrial town now changed beyond recognition, part of a community now vanished; about the Universe as a Cosmic Dustbin. It is the story of how the painful past Jeanette Winterson thought she had written over and repainted returned to haunt her later life, and sent her on a journey into madness and out again, in search of her real mother. It is also a book about other people's stories, showing how fiction and poetry can form a string of guiding lights, a life-raft which supports us when we are sinking.

Funny, acute, fierce and celebratory, this is a tough-minded search for belonging, for love, an identity, a home, and a mother.

Hardback £14.99

Charles Dickens: A Life by Claire Tomalin

Charles Dickens was a phenomenon. Perhaos the greatest novelist in the English language, he was the creator of characters who live immortally in the English imagination: Mr Pickwick, the Artful Dodger, Mrs Gamp, Mr Micawber, Pip, Miss Havesham and many more. He was also a demonically hard-working journalist, father of ten children, indefatigable walker and traveller, and tireless in his support of liberal social causes.

Charles Dickens: A Life is the examination of Dickens we deserve. It gives full measure to his heroic stature - his huge virtues both as a writer and as a human being - while observing his failings in both respects with an understanding but unblinking eye. Twenty years ago Claire Tomalin's award-winning The Invisible Woman convincingly traced the relationship between Dickens and Nelly Ternan in a triumph of sympathetic scholarship. Now she has written a full-scale biography worthy of Dicken's own pen: a comedy that turns to tragedy as the very qualities that made him great - his indomintable energy, boldness, imagination, showmanship and enjoyment of fame - finally destroyed him.

Hardback £30.00

The Genius in my Basement by Alexander Masters

Alexander Masters tripped over his first subject on a Cambridge pavement and the result was the multi-award winning Stuart: A Life Backwards. The second, he's found under his floor boards. One of the greatest mathematical progidies of the twentieth century stomps around the basment in semi-darkness, dodging between slagmites of bus timetables and engorged plastic bags. He eats tinned kippers stirred into packets on Bombay Mix. Simon is exploring a theoretical puzzle so complex and critical to our understanding of the universe that it is known as the Monster. It looks like a sudoku table - except a sodoku table has nine columns of numbers. The Monster has 808017424794512875886459904961710757005754368000000000.

But Simon's also up to something else. What's inside the decaying sports bag he never lets out of his clutches? Why does he hurtle out of the house in the middle of the night? And - Good God! - what is the noxious smell that creeps up the stairwell?

The Genius in my Basment is the grumpy, poignant, comical story - more intimate that either the author or his subject intended - about the frailty of brilliance, Britain's most uncooperative egghead, and a happy man.

Hardback £16.99

Below the Stairs by Margaret Powell

As a kitchen maid - the lowest of the low - she entered an entirely new world; one of stoves to be blacked, vegetables to be scrubbed, mistresses to be appeased, and even bootlaces to be ironed. Work started at 5.30 am and went on until after dark. It was a far cry from her childhood on the beaches of Hove, where money and food were scarce, but love and laughter never were.

Yet, from the gentleman with a penchant for stroking the housmaids' curlers, to raucous tea-dances with errand boys, to the heartbreaking story of Agnes the pregnant under-parlourmaid, Margaret's tales of her time in service are told with wit, warmth and a sharp eye for the prejudices of her situation. Brilliantly evoking the long-vanished world of masters and servants, Below Stairs is the remarkable true story of an indomitable woman, who, though her position was lowly, never stopped aiming high.

Paperback £6.99

A Diary of The Lady: My First Year and a half as Editor by Rachel Johnson

Appointed editor of The Lady - the oldest women's weekly in the world - Rachel Johnson faced the challenge of a lifetime. For a start, how do you become an editor when you've never, well, edited? How do you turn around a venerable title, full of ads for walk-in baths, during the worst recession year ever? And forget doubling the circulation in a year - what on earth do you wear to work when you've spent the last fifteen years at home in sweatpants?

Will Rachel save The Lady - or sink it?

Paperback £8.99

Hancox: A House and a Family by Charlotte Moore

In the 1880s a young, single and determined young woman bought Hancox - a rambling Tudor hall house deep in rural Sussex, with farm attached. For the next few decades she lived there with her new husband and his three children, apparently living an upper-class life of rural peace and tranquility. But all was not as it seemed, and disaster struck when war broke out. Charlotte Moore tells the entralling story of the house and family: one of madness and jealousy, love and loss, heroism and tragedy.

Paperback 9.99