The book takes the reader on an intellectual adventure through a carefully curated selection of 120 places that can be understood as metaphors of contemporary global culture. Spread across all seven continents, from the depths of the ocean to outer space, these places are divided into six chapters: Paradises, Utopias, Machines, Monsters, Ruins, and Instruments.

The spectrum ranges from Steve Jobs’ Apple Park in California to a national park in Costa Rica, a small field station for the protection of wild orangutans in Borneo, the Great Green Wall in Central Africa, the Trump resort Mar-a-Lago, to the border wall between Israel and Palestine. This book is a grand tour of the most pertinent places in the world today.

In our busy and hurried lives, we are losing the ability to be inactive. Human existence becomes fully absorbed by activity – even leisure, treated as a respite from work, becomes part of the same logic. Intense life today means first of all more performance or more consumption. We have forgotten that it is precisely inactivity, which does not produce anything, that represents an intense and radiant form of life.

For Byung-Chul Han, inactivity constitutes the human. Without moments of pause or hesitation, acting deteriorates into blind action and reaction. When life follows the rule of stimulus–response and need–satisfaction, it atrophies into pure survival: naked biological life. If we lose the ability to be inactive, we begin to resemble machines that simply function. True life begins when concern for survival, for the exigencies of mere life, ends. The ultimate purpose of all human endeavour is inactivity.

In a beautifully crafted ode to the art of being still, Han shows that the current crisis in our society calls for a very different way of life: one based on the vita contemplative. He pleads for bringing our ceaseless activities to a stop and making room for the magic that happens in between. Life receives its radiance only from inactivity.

Byung-Chul Han is the author of more than twenty books including The Burnout Society, Saving Beauty and The Scent of Time.

A captivating collection of extracts from women’s diaries, looking back over four centuries to discover how women’s experience – of men and children, sex and shopping, work and the natural world – has changed down the years. And, of course, how it hasn’t.

In this fascinating anthology, with a selection of entries for every day of the year, you’ll find Lady Anne Clifford in the seventeenth century and Loran Hurscot in the twentieth both stoically recording the demands of an unreasonable husband; Joan Wyndham and Anne Frank (at much the same time, but in wildly different settings) describing their first experiences with sex; and Anne Lister in the eighteenth-century north of England exploring her love affairs with women alongside Alice Walker in twentieth-century California.

Queen Victoria laments the loss of her husband; housewife Nella Last finds that World War II has given her an unexpected independence from hers. Educationalist Sylvia Ashton-Warner in modern New Zealand asks how to juggle work and family; Canadian artist Emily Carr how to manage her work and her identity. Mary Shelley records the death of her baby in half a line; Anne Morrow Lindberg heartbreakingly chronicles the weeks after the kidnap and murder of her baby son.

From Barbara Pym purchasing daring lingerie and Virginia Woolf relishing her new haircut to Sylvia Plath chronicling her ups and her downs and a stoical Amelia Stewart Knight on the pioneer trail, this book contains a rich mix of incredibly well-known diarists and more obscure ones, and often the voices echoing down the centuries sound eerily familiar today.

An odyssey of drive-offs, spiked slurpees, stale sausage rolls and sleep-deprived madness.

Most of us have done our time in the retail trenches, but service stations are undoubtedly the frontline, as Melburnian David Goodwin found out when he started working the weekend graveyard shift at his local servo.

From his very first night shift, David absorbed a consistent level of mind-bending lunacy, encountering everything from giant shoplifting bees and balaclava-clad goons hurling cordial-filled water bombs from the sunroof of their BMW, to anarcho-goths high on MDMA releasing large rats into the store from their matching Harry Potter backpacks.

Over the years, David grew to love his mad servo, handing out free pies and chocolate bars on the sly as he grew a backbone and became street smart. Amidst the unrelenting chaos, he eventually made it out of the servo circus – and lived to tell the tale.

For anyone who’s ever toiled under the unforgiving fluorescent lights of a customer service job, SERVO is a side-splitting and darkly mesmeric coming-of-age story from behind the anti-jump wire that will have you gritting your teeth, then cackling at the absurdity, idiocy and utterly beguiling strangeness of those who only come out at night.

This book is not a substitute for therapy … but it will give you the skills you need to help you meet your mental health goals.

Most of us could probably be doing more to take care of our mental health, whether by learning to manage stress and sadness or just by reconnecting with ourselves. But finding the time and money for professional therapy isn’t always possible – and this interactive guide provides an invaluable first step. While not a substitute for therapy, this book will give you the tools you need to make positive changes in your life and improve your mental wellbeing.

In Paperback Therapy, certified practising counsellor Tammi Miller takes you on a journey of self-discovery and healing. You’ll learn over 25 therapist-approved tools for everything from how to boost your self-esteem and live by your values to techniques for overcoming unhealthy habits and managing anxiety. With prompts and exercises proven to benefit your mental health and wellbeing, Paperback Therapy will help you discover a happier, healthier you.

Seventy-five years after Orwell finished writing his iconic novel, Sandra Newman has tackled the world of Big Brother in a truly convincing way, offering a dramatically different, feminist narrative that is true to and stands alongside the original. For the millions of readers who have been brought up with Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, here, finally, is a provocative, vital and utterly satisfying companion novel.

London, chief city of Airstrip One, the third most populous province of Oceania. It’s 1984 and Julia Worthing works as a mechanic fixing the novel-writing machines in the Fiction Department at the Ministry of Truth. Under the ideology of IngSoc and the rule of the Party and its leader Big Brother, Julia is a model citizen – cheerfully cynical, believing in nothing and caring not at all about politics. She routinely breaks the rules but also collaborates with the regime whenever necessary. Everyone likes Julia. A diligent member of the Junior Anti-Sex League (though she is secretly promiscuous) she knows how to survive in a world of constant surveillance, Thought Police, Newspeak, Doublethink, child spies and the black markets of the prole neighbourhoods. She’s very good at staying alive.

But Julia becomes intrigued by a colleague from the Records Department – a mid-level worker of the Outer Party called Winston Smith – when she sees him locking eyes with a superior from the Inner Party at the Two Minutes Hate. And when one day, finding herself walking toward Winston, she impulsively hands him a note – a potentially suicidal gesture – she comes to realise that she’s losing her grip and can no longer safely navigate her world.

In The Possessed, Witold Gombrowicz, considered by many to be Poland’s greatest modernist, draws together the familiar tropes of the Gothic novel to produce a darkly funny and playful subversion of the form.

With dreams of escaping his small-town existence and the limitations of his status, a young tennis coach travels to the heart of the Polish countryside where he is to train Maja Ocholowska, a beautiful and promising player whose bourgeois family has fallen upon difficult circumstances. But no sooner has he arrived than the relationship with his pupil develops into one of twisted love and hate, and he becomes embroiled in the fantastic happenings taking place at the dilapidated castle nearby. Haunted kitchens, bewitched towels, conniving secretaries and famous clairvoyants all conspire to determine the fate of the young lovers and the mad prince residing in the castle.

Translated directly into English for the first time by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, The Possessed is a comic masterpiece that, despite being a literary pastiche, has all the hallmarks of Gombrowicz’s typically provocative style.

Since the beginning of humanity’s existence, plants have provided us with everything we need for our survival – they sustain us with air to breathe, food to eat, materials to make clothes and shelter with, and medicine to treat and prevent disease. Their beauty can also enhance our mood and provide spiritual and emotional nourishment.

Western science has ‘discovered’ and named innumerable plant species over the course of its colonial history. To many Indigenous peoples, however, plants have been recognised for centuries as sentient beings, imbued with spirit and agency to help humanity. Publishing in partnership with the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, The Ethnobotanical offers a unique and beautiful perspective on plants and their roles in the lives of peoples from across the planet.

Dr. Sarah Edwards is an ethnobotanist and biodiversity informaticist who worked for many years at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew and now lectures at the University of Oxford. She is also the current plant records officer for Oxford Botanic Garden and Arboretum. Sarah was awarded her PhD from the University of London in 2006, and was a postdoctoral research fellow at UCL School of Pharmacy until 2013, where she is currently an Honorary Research Associate. Her research has included investigating medicinal plant use in the favelas of northeast Brazil; traditional plant knowledge in collaboration with Aboriginal communities in northern Australia; environmental factors in the aetiology of equine grass sickness; and the evidence base of herbal medicines. Sarah is the lead author of the book Phytopharmacy: An Evidence-Based Guide to Herbal Medicinal Products (Wiley, 2015).

What exactly is contemporary war art in the West today? This book considers the place of contemporary war art in the 2020s, a whole generation after 9/11 and long past the ‘War on Terror’.

Exploring the role contemporary art plays within conversations around war and imperialism, the book brings together chapters from international contemporary artists, theorists and curators, alongside the voices of contemporary war artists through original edited interviews.

It addresses newly emerged contexts in which war is found- not only sites of contemporary conflicts such as Ukraine, Yemen and Syria, but everywhere in western culture, from social media to ‘culture’ wars. With interviews from official war artists working in the UK, the US, and Australia, such as eX de Medici (Australia) and David Cotterrell (UK), as well as those working in post-colonial contexts, such as Baptist Coelho (India), the editors reflect on contemporary processes of memorialisation and the impact of British colonisation in Australia, India and its relation to historical conflicts. It focuses on three overlapping themes- firstly, the role of memory and amnesia in colonial contexts; secondly, the complex role of ‘official’ war art; and thirdly, questions of testimony and knowing in relation to alleged war crimes, torture and genocide.

Richly illustrated, and featuring three substantial interview chapters, The Politics of Artists in War Zones is a hands-on exploration of the complexities and challenges faced by war artists that contextualises the tensions between the contemporary art world and the portrayal of war. It is essential reading for researchers of fine art, curatorial studies, museum studies, conflict studies and photojournalism.

‘The writing is sublime, the research thorough, the eye for story superb…’ Sunday Telegraph

When Amitav Ghosh began the research for his monumental cycle of novels the Ibis Trilogy, he was startled to find how the lives of the 19th century sailors and soldiers he wrote of were dictated not only by the currents of the Indian Ocean, but also by the precious commodity carried in enormous quantities on those currents: opium. Most surprising at all, however, was the discovery that his own identity and family history was swept up in the story.

Smoke and Ashes is at once a travelogue, memoir and a history, drawing on decades of archival research. In it, Ghosh traces the transformative effect the opium trade had on Britain, India, and China, as well as the world at large. The trade was engineered by the British Empire, which exported Indian opium to sell to China and redress their great trade imbalance, and its revenues were essential to the Empire’s financial survival. Yet tracing the profits further, Ghosh finds opium at the origins of some of the world’s biggest corporations, of America’s most powerful families and prestigious institutions (from the Astors and Coolidges to the Ivy League), and of contemporary globalism itself.

Moving deftly between horticultural histories, the mythologies of capitalism, and the social and cultural repercussions of colonialism, in Smoke and Ashes Amitav Ghosh reveals the role that one small plant had in making our world, now teetering on the edge of catastrophe.