Profound and humane, Amartya Sen's Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny examines some of the most explosive problems of our time and shows how we can move towards peace as firmly as we have spiralled towards war. In this penetrating book, Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen argues that we are becoming increasingly divided along lines of religion and culture, ignoring the many other ways in which people see themselves, from class and profession to morals and politics. When we are put into narrow categories the importance of human life becomes lost. Through his lucid exploration of such subjects as multiculturalism, fundamentalism, terrorism and globalization, he brings out the need for a clear-headed understanding of human freedom and a constructive public voice in Global civil society. The hope of harmony in today's world lies in a clearer understanding of our sheer diversity.

From Nobel prize-winning economist Amartya Sen, The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian Culture, History and Identity brings together an illuminating selection of writings on contemporary India. India is an immensely diverse country with many distinct pursuits, vastly different convictions, widely divergent customs and a veritable feast of viewpoints. Out of these conflicting views spring a rich tradition of skeptical argument and cultural achievement which is critically important, argues Amartya Sen, for the success of India's democracy, the defence of its secular politics, the removal of inequalities related to class, caste, gender and community, and the pursuit of sub-continental peace.

The extraordinary early life in India and England of one of the world's leading public intellectuals Where is 'home'? For Amartya Sen, home has been many places - Dhaka in modern Bangladesh, the little university town of Santiniketan, where he was raised as much by his grandparents as by his parents, Calcutta where he first studied economics and was active in student movements, and Trinity College, Cambridge, to which he came aged 19. Sen brilliantly recreates the atmosphere in each of these. He remembers his river journeys between Dhaka and his parents' ancestral homes and wonderfully explores the rich history and culture of Bengal. In 1943 he witnessed the disastrous unfolding of the Bengal Famine, and the following year the inflaming of tensions between Hindus and Muslims. In the years before Independence, some of his family were imprisoned for their opposition to British rule. Central to Sen's formation was the intellectually liberating school in Santiniketan founded by Rabindranath Tagore (who gave him his name Amartya) and exciting conversations in the Coffee House on College Street in Calcutta. In Cambridge, he engaged with many of the leading economists and philosophers of the day, especially with the great Marxist thinker Piero Sraffa, who provided a direct connection not only to Wittgenstein, but to Antonio Gramsci and the anti-fascist battles in Italy in the 1920s. After years in Europe and America, the book ends when he returns to Delhi in 1963. Home in the World shows how Sen's experience shaped his ideas - about economics, philosophy, identity, community, famines, gender inequality, social choice and the power of discussion in public life. The joys of learning and the importance of friendship are powerfully conveyed. He invokes some of the great thinkers of the past and his own time - from Ashoka in the third century BC and Akbar in the sixteenth, to David Hume, Adam Smith, Karl Marx, John Maynard Keynes, Maurice Dobb, Kenneth Arrow and Eric Hobsbawm. Above all, Sen emphasises the importance of enlarging our views as much as we can, of human sympathy and understanding across time and distance, and of being at home in the world.

From Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen, The Idea of Justice is a refreshing alternative approach to mainstream theories of justice. Is justice an ideal, for ever beyond our grasp, or something that may actually guide our practical decisions and enhance our lives? At the heart of Sen's argument is his insistence on the role of public reason in establishing what can make societies less unjust. But there are always choices to be made between alternative assessments of what is reasonable, and competing positions can each be well defended. Rather than rejecting these pluralities, we should use them to construct a theory of justice that can accommodate divergent points of view. Sen also inspiringly shows how the principles of justice in the modern world must avoid parochialism and address vital questions of global injustice. The breadth of vision, intellectual acuity and striking humanity of one of the world's leading public intellectuals have never been more clearly shown than in this remarkable book.

Exorcise your destiny in an era-spanning supernatural adventure from manga legend Rumiko Takahashi! When Nanoka is transported back in time to a supernatural early 20th century, she gets recruited by aloof exorcist Mao. What thread of fate connects them? Together, they seek answers...and kick some demon butt along the way! As Mao and company begin to uncover Yurako's true identity, another mystery lands on their doorstep-who or what is causing members of the Kagami family to commit shocking acts of violence? Unfortunately, our friends soon discover the truth in the old saying "No good deed goes unpunished." Then, when a puppet master gains control of Mao, no one is safe. Plus, Mao and Nanoka go on…a date?!

The House of Atreus is cursed. A bloodline tainted by a generational cycle of violence and vengeance. This is the story of three women, their fates inextricably tied to this curse, and the fickle nature of men and gods. Clytemnestra The sister of Helen, wife of Agamemnon - her hopes of averting the curse are dashed when her sister is taken to Troy by the feckless Paris. Her husband raises a great army against them and determines to win, whatever the cost. Cassandra Princess of Troy, and cursed by Apollo to see the future but never to be believed when she speaks of it. She is powerless in her knowledge that the city will fall. Elektra The youngest daughter of Clytemnestra and Agamemnon, Elektra is horrified by the bloodletting of her kin. But can she escape the curse, or is her own destiny also bound by violence?

Jason Taverner is a Six, the result of top secret government experiments forty years before which produced a handful of unnaturally bright and beautiful people - and he's the prime-time idol of millions until, inexplicably, all record of him is wiped from the data banks of Earth. Suddenly he is a man with no identity, in a police state where everyone is closely monitored. Can he ever be rich and famous again? Or are those memories just an illusion?

It is a dream of electrifying eroticism and inexplicable violence, recounted by a young woman to her analyst, Sigmund Freud. It is a horrifying, yet restrained narrative of the Holocaust. It is a searing vision of the wounds of our century, and an attempt to heal them. Interweaving poetry and case history, fantasy and historical truth-telling. The White Hotel is a modern classic of enduring emotional power that attempts nothing less than to reconcile the notion of individual destiny with that of historical fate.

For the four characters at the heart of Will Self's brilliantly acute novel of our times the five hundred-quid worry bead in their pocket may be both a blessing and a curse. For elderly Dr Zachary Busner it is a mysterious object - 'NO CALLER ID - How should this be interpreted? Is it that the caller is devoid of an identity due to some psychological or physical trauma?' - but also it's his life line to his autistic grandson Ben, whose own connection with technology is, in turn, a vital one. For Jonathan De'Ath , aka 'the Butcher', MI6 agent, the phone may reveal his best kept secret of all: that Colonel Gawain Thomas, husband, father, and highly-trained tank commander - is Jonathan 's long time lover. And when technology, love and violence finally converge in the wreckage of postwar Iraq, the Colonel and the Spy's dalliance will determine the destiny of nations. Uniting our most urgent contemporary concerns: from the ubiquitous mobile phone to a family in chaos; from the horror of modern war, to the end of privacy, Phone is Will Self's most important and compelling novel to date.

Madrid, 1957. Daniel, young, wealthy and unsure of his place in the world, views the city through the lens of his camera. Ana, a hotel maid whose family is suffering under the fascist dictatorship of General Franco. Lives and hearts collide as they unite to uncover the hidden darkness within the city. A darkness that could engulf them all… Master storyteller Ruta Sepetys once again shines light into one of history's darkest corners in this epic, heart-wrenching novel about identity, unforgettable love and the hidden violence of silence.

Both a fast-paced story of social unrest and strike, and the tale of one young man's struggle for identity, IN DUBIOUS BATTLE is a novel about the apocalyptic violence that breaks out when the masses become the mob. Set in California apple country, a strike by migrant workers spirals out of control, as principled defiance turns into blind fanaticism. Caught in this upheaval is Jim Nolan, a once aimless man who finds himself briefly becoming the leader of the strike before being crushed in its service. IN DUBIOUS BATTLE explores and dramatises many of the ideas and themes key to Steinbeck's writing.

Miner's son David Powlett-Jones returns from the carnage of the Western Front in 1918, shell-shocked and bitterly hardened by the violence of war. He begins life again as a master at a remote Devon school, controlling the destiny of boys barely his junior. As the years pass David becomes a teacher of rare talent, begins to find peace, and is able to adjust to the changes which are overwhelming society. But soon he will have to face up to the prospect of another terrible war.

Calla knows how the lottery works. Everyone does. On the day of your first bleed, you report to the station to learn what kind of woman you will be. A white ticket grants you children. A blue ticket grants you freedom. You are relieved of the terrible burden of choice. And, once you've taken your ticket, there is no going back. But what if the life you're given is the wrong one? Blue Ticket is a devastating enquiry into free will and the fraught space of motherhood. Bold and chilling, it pushes beneath the skin of female identity and patriarchal violence, to the point where human longing meets our animal bodies.

This book explores an unrecognised but mighty taboo our tacit conspiracy to ignore who, or what, we really are... We are therefore in urgent need of a sense of our own existence which is in accord with the physical facts and which over comes our feeling of alienation from the universe. Alan Watts asks what is the cause of the illusion that the self is a separate ego, housed in a bag of skin, and which confronts a universe of physical objects that are alien to it. Rather a person s identity (their ego) binds them to the physical universe, creating a relationship with their environment and other people. The separation of the self and the physical world leads to the misuse of technology and the attempt to violently subjugate man s natural environment, leading to its destruction. Explaining man s role in the universe as a unique expression of the total universe, and interdependent on it, Alan Watts offers a new understanding of personal identity. It reveals the mystery of existence, presenting an alternative to the feelings of alienation that is prevalent in Western society, and a vision of how we can come to understand the cosmic self that is within every living thing. Offering spiritual answers to the problems of a materialistic lifestyle, alienated from the natural world, Alan Watts is the voice of all who seek a deeper understanding of their own identity and role in the world.

This book explores an unrecognised but mighty taboo our tacit conspiracy to ignore who, or what, we really are... We are therefore in urgent need of a sense of our own existence which is in accord with the physical facts and which over comes our feeling of alienation from the universe. Alan Watts asks what is the cause of the illusion that the self is a separate ego, housed in a bag of skin, and which confronts a universe of physical objects that are alien to it. Rather a person s identity (their ego) binds them to the physical universe, creating a relationship with their environment and other people. The separation of the self and the physical world leads to the misuse of technology and the attempt to violently subjugate man s natural environment, leading to its destruction. Explaining man s role in the universe as a unique expression of the total universe, and interdependent on it, Alan Watts offers a new understanding of personal identity. It reveals the mystery of existence, presenting an alternative to the feelings of alienation that is prevalent in Western society, and a vision of how we can come to understand the cosmic self that is within every living thing. Offering spiritual answers to the problems of a materialistic lifestyle, alienated from the natural world, Alan Watts is the voice of all who seek a deeper understanding of their own identity and role in the world.

Freud's religious unbeliefs are too easily dismissed as the standard scientific rationalism of the twentieth-century intellectual, yet he scorned the high-minded humanism of his contemporaries. In Mass Psychology and Analysis of the 'I' he explores the notion of 'mass-psychology' - his findings would prove all too prophetic in the years that followed. Writings such as A Religious Experience and The Future of an Illusion continue earlier work on the essential savagery of the civilized mind, and Moses the Man and Monotheistic Religion excavates the roots of religion and racism, which he concludes are inextricably intertwined. This remarkable collection reveals Freud not only at his most radically pessimistic, but also at his most personally courageous - engaging with his own adherences, his own antecedents, his own identity.