If there is one thing that most of us aspire to, it is, simply, to be happy. And yet attaining happiness has become, it appears, anything but simple. Having stuff – The Latest, The Newest, The Best Yet – is all too often peddled as the sure fire route to happiness. So why then, in our consumer-driven society, is depression, stress and anxiety ever more common, affecting every strata of society and every age, even, worryingly, the very young? Why is it, when we have so much, that many of us still feel we are missing something and the rush of pleasure when we buy something new turns so quickly into a feeling of emptiness, or purposelessness, or guilt? So what is the route to real, deep, long lasting happiness? Could it be that our lives have just become overly crowded, that we’ve lost sight of the things – the simple things – that give a sense of achievement, a feeling of joy or excitement? That make us happy. Do we need to take a step back, reprioritise? Do we need to make our lives more simple? Kate Humble’s fresh and frank exploration of a stripped-back approach to life is uplifting, engaging and inspiring – and will help us all find balance and happiness every day.

Every year, Robert's family comes together at a rambling old house to celebrate his birthday. Aunts, uncles, distant cousins - it has been a milestone in their lives for decades. But this year Robert doesn't want to be reminded of what has happened since they last met - and nor, for quite different reasons, does his granddaughter Kate. Neither of them is sure they can face the party. But for both Robert and Kate, it may become the most important gathering of all.

Every year, Robert's family comes together at a rambling old house to celebrate his birthday. Aunts, uncles, distant cousins - it has been a milestone in their lives for decades. But this year Robert doesn't want to be reminded of what has happened since they last met - and nor, for quite different reasons, does his granddaughter Kate. Neither of them is sure they can face the party. But for both Robert and Kate, it may become the most important gathering of all.

Every year, Robert's family comes together at a rambling old house to celebrate his birthday. Aunts, uncles, distant cousins - it has been a milestone in their lives for decades. But this year Robert doesn't want to be reminded of what has happened since they last met - and nor, for quite different reasons, does his granddaughter Kate. Neither of them is sure they can face the party. But for both Robert and Kate, it may become the most important gathering of all.

Two days after the Winter Solstice in 2019 Kerri and her partner M moved to a small, remote railway cottage in the heart of Ireland. They were looking for a home, somewhere to stay put. What followed was a year of many changes. The pandemic arrived and their isolated home became a place of enforced isolation. It was to be a year unlike any we had seen before. But the seasons still turned, the swallows came at their allotted time, the rhythms of the natural world went on unchecked. For Kerri there was to be one more change, a longed-for but unhoped for change. Cacophony of Bone maps the circle of a year – a journey from one place to another, field notes of a life – from one winter to the next. It is a telling of a changed life, in a changed world – and it is about all that does not change. All that which simply keeps on – living and breathing, nesting and dying – in spite of it all. When the pandemic came time seemed to shapeshift, so this is also a book about time. It is, too, a book about home, and what that can mean. Fragmentary in subject and form, fluid of language, this is an ode to a year, a place, and a love, that changed a life.

It was a summer of warmth. Kate Ryan and her husband, John, have a rollicking pub in the Irish village of Mountfern. lovely twelve-year-old twins. and such wonderful dreams. It was a summer of innocence. but all that is about to change this.

New York, 2000. Kate and Ben meet at a party and immediately fall in love. It is the first year of the new millennium, the first year without a war anywhere in the world. The United Nations has just planted its flag on Mars, and a Green Party senator is about to become the first female president of the United States. Kate falls asleep, knowing that she is loved. London, 1593. Kate wakes as Emilia – the mistress of a nobleman – and finds the plague at her door. Afflicted by premonitions of a burnt and lifeless city, she sets out to save the world. Each decision she makes will change her life with Ben forever. A story of love and alternate universes, madness and time travel, The Heavens is a dream bound up in a strange awakening; it is a bewitching novel of what we have lost, and what we might yet be able to save.

In this stunning and timely novel, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning author Louise Erdrich creates a wickedly funny ghost story, a tale of passion, of a complex marriage and of a woman's relentless errors. Louise Erdrich's latest novel, The Sentence, asks what we owe to the living, the dead, to the reader and to the book. A small independent bookstore in Minneapolis is haunted from November 2019 to November 2020 by the store's most annoying customer. Flora dies on All Souls' Day, but she simply won't leave the store. Tookie, who has landed a job selling books after years of incarceration that she survived by reading 'with murderous attention,' must solve the mystery of this haunting while at the same time trying to understand all that occurs in Minneapolis during a year of grief, astonishment, isolation and furious reckoning. The Sentence begins on All Souls' Day 2019 and ends on All Souls' Day 2020. Its mystery and proliferating ghost stories during this one year propel a narrative as rich, emotional and profound as anything Louise Erdrich has written.

In Eva Carter's How to Save a Life, saving a life is only the start of the story... It's nearly midnight on the eve of the millennium when eighteen-year-old Joel's heart stops. A school friend, Kerry, performs CPR for almost twenty exhausting minutes, ultimately saving Joel's life, while her best friend Tim freezes, unable to help. That moment of life and death changes the course of all three lives over the next two decades: each time Kerry, Joel and Tim believe they've found love, discovered their vocation, or simply moved on, their lives collide again. ...Because bravery isn't just about life or death decisions; it's also about how to keep on living afterwards.

An ecological romance with a pulsing heart, equal parts Rider Haggard and Chico Buarque – one of the world’s greatest and most beloved storytellers broadens her style and reach with a Amazonian adventure story that will appeal to all ages. Fifteen-year-old Alexander Cold has the chance to take the trip of a lifetime. With his mother in hospital, too ill to look after him, Alex is sent out to his grandmother Kate – a fearless reporter with blue eyes ‘as sharp as daggers’ points’. Kate is about to embark on an expedition to the dangerous, remote world of the Amazon rainforest, but rather than change her plans, she simply takes Alex along with her. They set off with their team – including a local guide and his daughter Nadia, with her wild, curly hair and skin the colour of honey – in search of a fabled headhunting tribe and a legendary, marauding creature known to locals as the ‘Beast’, only to find out much, much more about the mysteries of the jungle and its inhabitants. In a novel rich in adventure, magic and spirit, internationally celebrated novelist Isabel Allende takes readers of all ages on a voyage of discovery and wonder, deep into the heart of the Amazon.

Low life writer and alcoholic Henry Chinaski was born to survive. Now, at the age of fifty, he is living the life of a rock star, running three hundred hangovers a year and a sex life that would cripple Casanova. Women is a riotous and uncompromisingly vivid account of life on the edge.

'Isn't the life of any person made up out of the telling of two tales, after all? The whole world makes more sense if you remember that everyone has two lives, their real lives and their dreams, both stories only a tape's breadth apart from each other, impossibly divided, indivisibly close.' Every year, Robert's family comes together at a rambling old house to celebrate his birthday. Aunts, uncles, distant cousins - it has been a milestone in their lives for decades. But this year Robert doesn't want to be reminded of what has happened since they last met - and nor, for quite different reasons, does his granddaughter Kate. Neither of them is sure they can face the party. But for both Robert and Kate, it may become the most important gathering of all. As lyrical and true to life as Norris's critically acclaimed debut Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain, which won a Betty Trask Award and was shortlisted for the Ondaatje Prize and Debut of the Year at the British Book Awards, this is a compelling, emotional story of family, human frailty, and the marks that love leaves on us.

One year + one beach house + zero parents = Ten Things We Shouldn't Have Done I was about to live a sixteen-year-old's dream. House on the beach. No parents. Parties whenever we wanted. Boys wherever we wanted. April and her best friend, Vi, are living by themselves. Of course, April's parents don't know that. They think she's living with Vi and Vi's mum. But it's not April's fault that her dad decided to move away in the middle of high school. So who could blame her for a little white lie Or the other nine things that April (probably) shouldn't have done that year...

The village school is to get a new head, and the inhabitants of Turnham Malpas await her arrival with curiosity. At first sight, Kate Pascoe seems ideal. She's young, pretty and obviously loves her job. But when she introduces meditation classes for her ten-year-olds, and even tree-hugging, the villagers begin to think again. Then a strange malaise afflicts the whole village: lights are seen in Sykes Wood at night; a dog long dead appears to come to life, and a sudden shocking death plunges the village into a state of superstitious dread. And always at the eye of the storm is Kate Pascoe...

The stunning companion to Kate Atkinson's #1 bestseller Life After Life, "one of the best novels I've read this century" (Gillian Flynn). "He had been reconciled to death during the war and then suddenly the war was over and there was a next day and a next day. Part of him never adjusted to having a future." Kate Atkinson's dazzling Life After Life explored the possibility of infinite chances and the power of choices, following Ursula Todd as she lived through the turbulent events of the last century over and over again. A God in Ruins tells the dramatic story of the 20th Century through Ursula's beloved younger brother Teddy--would-be poet, heroic pilot, husband, father, and grandfather-as he navigates the perils and progress of a rapidly changing world. After all that Teddy endures in battle, his greatest challenge is living in a future he never expected to have. An ingenious and moving exploration of one ordinary man's path through extraordinary times, A God In Ruins proves once again that Kate Atkinson is one of the finest novelists of our age.

In Child's Play, the world's favourite storyteller, Danielle Steel movingly writes about the highs and lows of motherhood in this powerful family drama. Kate Morgan is a senior partner at a prestigious New York law firm. She couldn't be prouder of her three grown children, who have all excelled in their chosen careers. A single mother after the death of her husband, Kate keeps a tight rein on her family, her career and even her own emotions. But she's never asked herself if she truly knows her children or their dreams in life. She is about to find out. One by one, each of her children makes a sudden choice that turns Kate's world upside down. When events begin to escalate, Kate can't keep up and her heavily organized life is thrown into turmoil. Kate slowly discovers that happiness is living the life you can choose. But can she accept the paths her children have taken?