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Yes! No! But Wait…! is the most straightforward book on writing a novel ever published.

It is also the most practical, honest and useful.

Tim Lott admits he can’t teach someone how to write a novel (that’s one of the myths propagated by the novel-writing industry).

But he can help anyone construct a solid platform on which they can stand to discover whether they have the talent, will and imagination required of any novelist.

A distillation of a lifetime’s reading, writing and thinking about stories and how to tell them, Yes! No! But Wait…! is the one book any aspiring author needs.

The New York Times Bestseller

The triumphant story of three courageous women who become the first female doctors.

‘These women changed the world’ – Nina Sankovitch, bestselling author of American Rebels

In the early 1800s, women were dying in large numbers from treatable diseases because they avoided receiving medical care. Examinations performed by male doctors were often demeaning and painful, and women faced damaging social stigma from illness.

Despite countless obstacles, Elizabeth Blackwell, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson and Sophia Jex-Blake fought for a woman’s place in the male-dominated medical field. The three pioneers earned medical degrees and paved the way for other women to do the same, then built women-run hospitals and teaching colleges – creating for the first time medical care for women by women.

How games are being harnessed as instruments of exploitation – and what we can do about it

Warehouse workers pack boxes while a virtual dragon races across their screen. If they beat their colleagues, they get an award. If not, they can be fired. Uber presents exhausted drivers with challenges to keep them driving. China scores its citizens so they behave well, and games with in-app purchases use achievements to empty your wallet.

Points, badges and leaderboards are creeping into every aspect of modern life. In You’ve Been Played, game designer Adrian Hon delivers a blistering takedown of how corporations, schools and governments use games and gamification as tools for profit and coercion. These are games that we often have no choice but to play, where losing has heavy penalties. You’ve Been Played is a scathing indictment of a tech-driven world that wants to convince us that misery is fun, and a call to arms for anyone who hopes to preserve their dignity and autonomy.

People of good will on both the left and the right are secretly asking themselves the same question: how has the conversation on race gone so crazy?

Bestselling author and acclaimed linguist John McWhorter argues that an illiberal neoracism, disguised as antiracism, is hurting black communities and weakening the social fabric.

We’re told to read books and listen to music by people of colour but that wearing certain clothes is ‘appropriation.’ We hear that being white automatically gives you privilege and that being black makes you a victim. We want to speak up but fear we’ll be seen as unwoke, or worse, labelled a racist. According to John McWhorter, the problem is that a well-meaning but pernicious form of antiracism has become, not a progressive ideology, but a religion – and one that’s illogical, unreachable, and unintentionally neoracist.

In Woke Racism, McWhorter reveals the workings of this new religion, from the original sin of ‘white privilege’ and the weaponization of cancel culture to ban heretics, to the evangelical fervour of the ‘woke mob.’ He shows how this religion that claims to ‘dismantle racist structures’ is actually harming his fellow black Americans by infantilizing black people, setting black students up for failure, and passing policies that disproportionately damage black communities. The new religion might be called ‘antiracism,’ but it features a racial essentialism that’s barely distinguishable from racist arguments of the past.

Fortunately, for all of us, it’s not too late to push back against woke racism. McWhorter shares scripts and encouragement with those trying to deprogramme friends and family. And most importantly, he offers a roadmap to justice that actually will help, not hurt, black people.

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

‘A thoughtful, serious and well-written book that tackles an immensely important subject’ – Observer

How many avoidable deaths are there in the NHS every week?

150.

What figure should we aim for?

Zero.

The NHS is the pride of Britain. It’s an army of highly skilled and talented healthcare professionals, armed with the most cutting-edge therapies and medicines, and a budget bigger than the GDP of most countries in the world.

Yet avoidable failures are common. And the result is tragic deaths up and down the country every day.

Jeremy Hunt, the longest-serving Health Secretary in history, knows exactly what the cost is. In the letters he received from bereaved family members, he was constantly confronted by the heart-breaking reality of slip-ups and mistakes.

There is increasing conflict between public pride in the NHS and the exhausted daily reality for many doctors and nurses, now experiencing burnout in record numbers. Waiting lists are up, staffing numbers inadequate, and all the while an ageing population and medical advances increase both demand and expectations. With pressures like these, is it surprising that mistakes start to creep in?

This great British institution is crying out for renewal. In Zero, taking the broadest approach, thinking through everything from staffing to technology, budgets to culture, Hunt presents a manifesto for that renewal.

Mistakes happen. But nobody deserves to become a statistic in an NHS hospital. That’s why we need to aim for zero.

‘A masterful introduction to the state of the art in managerial decision-making. Surprisingly, it is also a pleasure to read’ – Daniel Kahneman, author of Thinking, Fast and Slow

A lively, research-based tour of nine common decision-making traps – and practical tools for avoiding them – from a professor of strategic thinking We make decisions all the time. It’s so natural that we hardly stop to think about it. Yet even the smartest and most experienced among us make frequent and predictable errors. So, what makes a good decision? Should we trust our intuitions, and if so, when? How can we avoid being tripped up by cognitive biases when we are not even aware of them?

You’re About to Make a Terrible Mistake! offers clear and practical advice that distils the latest developments in behavioural economics and cognitive psychology into actionable tools for making clever, effective decisions in business and beyond.

Yang Jisheng’s The World Turned Upside Down is the definitive history of the Cultural Revolution, in withering and heartbreaking detail.

As a major political event and a crucial turning point in the history of the People’s Republic of China, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) marked the zenith as well as the nadir of Mao Zedong’s ultra-leftist politics. Reacting in part to the Soviet Union’s “revisionism” that he regarded as a threat to the future of socialism, Mao mobilized the masses in a battle against what he called “bourgeois” forces within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). This ten-year-long class struggle on a massive scale devastated traditional Chinese culture as well as the nation’s economy.

Following his groundbreaking and award-winning history of the Great Famine, Tombstone, Yang Jisheng here presents the only history of the Cultural Revolution by an independent scholar based in mainland China, and makes a crucial contribution to understanding those years’ lasting influence today.

The World Turned Upside Down puts every political incident, major and minor, of those ten years under extraordinary and withering scrutiny, and arrives in English at a moment when contemporary Chinese governance is leaning once more toward a highly centralized power structure and Mao-style cult of personality.

‘Fascinating. It blew my mind!’ Malcolm Gladwell

Wonderworks reveals that literature is among the mightiest technologies that humans have ever invented, precision-honed to give us what our brains most want and need.

Literature is a technology like any other. And the writers we revere – from Homer to Shakespeare, Austen to Ferrante – each made a unique technical breakthrough that can be viewed as both a narrative and neuroscientific advancement. But literature’s great invention was to address problems we could not solve: not how to start a fire or build a boat, but how to live and love; how to maintain courage in the face of death; how to account for the fact that we exist at all.

Based on Angus Fletcher’s own research, Wonderworks tells the story of the greatest literary inventions through the ages, from ancient Mesopotamia to modern-day America. It draws on cutting-edge neuroscience to demonstrate that the inventions really work: they enrich our lives with joy, hope, courage and energy, and they help our brains heal from grief, loneliness and even trauma.

From ancient Chinese lyrics to nursery rhymes and fairy tales, from slave narratives to contemporary TV shows, Wonderworks walks us through the evolution of literature’s crucial blueprints, and offers us a new understanding of its power.

‘Woody Allen’s wonderful novel reads like one of his films’ The Telegraph

‘As a portrait of Woody Allen by Woody Allen, it’s a classic’ The Standard

‘Good gags abound in this tale of a bespectacled Jewish writer caught up in a #MeToo takedown’ Guardian

Asher Baum is quietly losing his mind. Can you blame him?

‘Maybe what I really want is to make sense of all people’s lives. Of everything, the whole shebang’

A middle-aged Jewish journalist turned novelist and playwright, consumed with anxiety about everything under the sun, Baum’s turgid philosophical books receive tepid reviews and his prestigious New York publisher has dropped him. His third marriage is on the rocks and he suspects his handsome and successful younger brother may have seduced his Harvard-educated wife. He is uneasy with her close relationship with her son, a more successful author than he, and suspicious of her closeness with their neighbour in Connecticut. And in a moment of irrationality, he has impulsively tried to kiss a pretty young journalist during an interview that she is about to go public with.

Is it any wonder Baum has started talking to himself? Strangers shake their heads and walk around him on the street. Meanwhile he learns a startling secret that could cause havoc should he expose it. Should he keep it to himself or reveal it and blow up his marriage?

What’s with Baum? is Woody Allen’s first novel and it is everything you would expect of him–and more. A portrait of an intellectual crippled by neurotic concerns about the futility and emptiness of life; an amusing glimpse into the New York publishing establishment; above all, a highly entertaining, tightly plotted, beautifully wrought piece of fiction from one of America’s greatest and most versatile cinematic and literary talents.

FROM THE BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF THE FROZEN RIVER, BASED ON A TWISTED TRUE MURDER MYSTERY

‘Inspired by a real-life unsolved mystery, this mesmerizing novel features characters that make a lasting impression’ People

‘This fun, fast-paced novel has it all: speakeasies, gangsters, show girls, and not one, not two, but three women scorned. A real page-turner’ Melanie Benjamin, bestselling author of The Aviator’s Wife

‘Vivid and unsettling, with a finale as startling as the pop of a gun’ Caroline Leavitt, bestselling author of Pictures of You 

One summer night in 1930, Judge Joseph Crater steps into a New York City cab and is never heard from again. Behind this great man are three women, each with her own tale to tell: Stella, his fashionable wife, the picture of propriety; Maria, their steadfast maid, indebted to the judge; and Ritzi, his showgirl mistress, willing to seize any chance to break out of the chorus line.

As the twisted truth emerges, Ariel Lawhon’s wickedly entertaining debut mystery transports us into the smoky jazz clubs, the seedy backstage dressing rooms, and the shadowy streets beneath the Art Deco skyline.

FIVE STAR RAVE READER REVIEWS