We can’t always be there to protect our kids as they make their way in the world. What we can do is equip them with the tools they need to ensure they have a positive social experience.
Based on many years’ experience counselling bullies and targets, Stella O’Malley offers concrete strategies to empower children and teenagers to deal confidently with bullying and dominant characters.
She identifies effective ways for families to cope when bullying occurs, including approaching the school authorities, communicating with the bully’s parents and tips to tackle cyberbullying.
Stella’s common-sense approach will help your child, tween or teen to develop their emotional intelligence and will provide relief for families navigating the rapidly changing social environment, both online and in school.
A 2021 Daily Telegraph Book of the Year
‘Had me gripped from the outset’ Fergal Keane
‘Everyone should read the testimonies of the Chibok girls who survived the capture’ Malala
In the spring of 2014, an American hip hop producer unwittingly triggered an online hurricane with a quickly thumbed tweet featuring a four-word demand: #BringBackOurGirls. The hashtag called for the release of 276 Nigerian schoolgirls who’d been kidnapped by a little-known Islamic terrorist sect called Boko Haram. Within hours, the campaign had been joined by millions, including some of the world’s most recognizable people: Oprah Winfrey, Pope Francis, David Cameron, Kim Kardashian and Michelle Obama.
Their tweets launched an army of would-be liberators – American soldiers and drones, Swiss diplomats, spies and glory hunters – into an obscure conflict in a remote part of Nigeria that had barely begun to use the internet. But when hostage talks and military intervention failed, the schoolgirls were forced to take survival into their own hands. As the days in captivity dragged into years, they became witnesses, and often victims, of unspeakable brutality that they chronicled in secret diaries. Many of the girls were Christians who refused to take the one easier path offered to them – converting their captors’ extremist creed.
Bring Back Our Girls is an urgent and engrossing work of investigative journalism that unfolds across four continents, from the remote forests of northern Nigeria to the White House; from Khartoum safe houses to gilded hotel lobbies in the Swiss Alps. It plumbs the promise and peril of an era whose politics are fuelled by the power of hashtag advocacy – and at its centre stand some exceptionally courageous and resourceful young women.
‘Fascinating’ Margaret Atwood
Can taking the law into your own hands be the right thing to do?
In June 2013, three upstanding citizens of a small town in Nova Scotia murdered their neighbour, Phillip Boudreau, while out fishing.
Boudreau was an inventive small-time criminal who had terrorised and entertained Petit de Grat for two decades. He had been in prison for nearly half his adult life. He was funny and frightening, loathed, loved and feared. Boudreau seemed invincible, a miscreant who would plague the village forever. As many people said, if those fellows hadn’t killed him, someone else would have.
Blood in the Water is a gripping story in a brilliantly drawn setting, about power and law, security and self-respect, and the nature of community. And at its heart is a disturbing question: are there times when taking the law into your own hands is not only understandable but the responsible thing to do?
Thick with owls and badgers, oak trees and wood piles, scarecrows and ghosts, and Tom Cox’s loud and excitable dad, this book is full of the folklore of several counties the ancient kind and the everyday variety as well as wild places, mystical spots and curious objects. Emerging from this focus on the detail are themes that are broader and bigger and more important than ever.
Tom’s writing treads a new path, one that has a lot in common with a rambling country walk; it’s bewitched by fresh air and big skies, intrepid in minor ways, haunted by weather and old stories and the spooky edges of the outdoors, restless and prone to a few detours, but it always reaches its destination in the end.
Benji is an imaginative eight-year-old boy, living with his parents in a mining village in Nottinghamshire amidst the spoil heaps and chip shops that characterise the last industrially bruised outposts of the Midlands, just before Northern England begins. His family are the eccentric neighbours on a street where all the houses are set on a tilt, slowly subsiding into the excavated space below. Told through Benji’s voice and a colourful variety of others over a deeply joyful and strange twelve-month period, it’s a story about growing up, the oddness beneath the everyday, what we once believed the future would be, and those times in life when anything seems possible.
1983 is steeped in the distinctive character of a setting far weirder than it might at first appear: from robots living next door, and a school caretaker who is not all he seems, to missing memories and the aliens Benji is certain are trying to abduct him.
As featured on BBC Radio 4
‘Funny and touching’ Sunday Times
‘Extraordinary’ Observer
‘Full of both wisdom and humour’ Julia Samuel
‘Funny, moving, brave’ Jeremy Bowen
‘I had the privilege to conduct Simon’s last broadcast interview – knowing his wise words on the page could live on afterwards’ Emma Barnett
*****READER REVIEWS
‘Simon’s cheerful voice comes through every page’
‘An absolute gift of a book … This book has the potential to change your life’
‘Stunning’
It isn’t quite ‘Don’t buy any green bananas’. But it’s close to ‘Don’t start any long books’.
In his mid-40s, Simon Boas was diagnosed with incurable cancer – it had been caught too late, and spread around his body. But he was determined to die as he had learned to live – optimistically, thinking the best of people, and prioritising what really matters in life.
In A Beginner’s Guide to Dying Simon considers and collates the things that have given him such a great sense of peace and contentment, and why dying at 46 really isn’t so bad. And for that reason it’s also only partly about ‘dying’. It is mostly a hymn to the joy and preciousness of life, and why giving death a place can help all of us make even more of it.
Behind You Is the Sea is a compelling debut that fearlessly challenges stereotypes surrounding Palestinian culture.
‘Intergenerational differences … are explored from both sides with keen-eyed humanity and understanding’ Marie Claire
‘Funny and beautifully written’ Stylist Magazine
‘A rich panoply of a community’ Crack Magazine Book of the Month
‘Wonderful … A novel about ordinary people fighting for what they believe to be right’ Irish Independent
‘A poignant reminder of our shared humanity … brimming with hope and empathy’ Irish Times
Funny and touching, Behind You Is the Sea brings us into the homes and lives of three main families – the Baladis, the Salamehs and the Ammars – Palestinian immigrants who’ve all found a different welcome in America. Their various fates and struggles cause their community dynamic to sizzle and sometimes explode, as their lives intersect across divides of class, generation and religion.
From the author of Irreversible Damage, an investigation into how mental health overdiagnosis is harming, not helping, children
‘A pacy, no-holds barred attack on mental health professionals and parenting experts … thought-provoking‘ Financial Times
‘A message that parents, teachers, mental health professionals and policymakers need to hear’ New Statesman
In virtually every way that can be measured, Gen Z’s mental health is worse than that of previous generations. What’s gone wrong?
In Bad Therapy, Abigail Shrier argues that the problem isn’t the kids – it’s the mental-health experts. Drawing on hundreds of interviews with child psychologists, parents, teachers and young people themselves, she reveals that most of the therapeutic approaches have serious side effects and few proven benefits: for instance, talk therapy can induce rumination, trapping children in cycles of anxiety and depression; while ‘gentle parenting’ can encourage emotional turbulence in children as they lash out, desperate for an adult to be in charge. Bad Therapy is a must-read for anyone questioning why our efforts to support our kids have backfired.
‘An absolutely wonderful book’ – Deborah Moggach
In a London street at the turn of the twenty-first century, two neighbours start to chat over the heads of their children.
Kate Clanchy is a writer, privileged and sheltered. Antigona is a refugee from Kosovo. On instinct, Kate offers Antigona a job as a nanny, and Antigona accepts. Over the next five years and a thousand cups of coffee Antigona’s extraordinary story slowly emerges. She has escaped from a war, she has divorced a violent husband, but can she escape the harsh code she was brought up with?
At the kitchen table where anything can be said, the women discover they have everything, as well as nothing, in common.
If you want to ‘change lives, change organisations, change the world,’ the Stanford business school’s motto, you need power.
Is power the last dirty secret or the secret to success? Both. While power carries some negative connotations, power is a tool that can be used for good or evil. Don’t blame the tool for how some people used it.
Rooted firmly in social science research, Pfeffer’s 7 rules provide a manual for increasing your ability to get things done, including increasing the positive effects of your job performance.
With 7 Rules of Power, you’ll learn, through both numerous examples as well as research evidence, how to accomplish change in your organisation, your life, the lives of others, and the world.