# data[].attributes.body
captivating

# data[].attributes.body
Great, informative, myth-busting

# data[].attributes.body
Informative, geeky, fun

# data[].attributes.body
Immersive, Engaging, Heartbreaking

# data[].attributes.headline
BEWICK, T: A General History of Quadrupeds, 1791

# data[].attributes.subject
BEWICK, T: A General History of Quadrupeds, 1791

# data[].attributes.body
Early Natural History

# data[].attributes.attachment_caption
Written by Jeff Wheeler who wrote a series called 'The Grave Kingdom'

# data[].attributes.body
Embedded in adventure, wide expansion of mysteries in the story and action flashes at every turn on the way of every chapter.

# data[].attributes.body
Eye - opening, shocking, useful

# data[].attributes.body
Heart wrenching.

# data[].attributes.headline
Playing the Bass with Three Left Hands, by Will Carruthers

# data[].attributes.subject
Playing the Bass with Three Left Hands, by Will Carruthers

# data[].attributes.body
Funny, honest memoir

# data[].attributes.body
Captivating, intersecting, unexpected.

# data[].attributes.body
Dystopian, Patriarchy, Gladit'snotme

# data[].attributes.body
Fantasy, magic, escapeism . . .

# data[].attributes.body
A great Read

# data[].attributes.attachment_caption
L'usage du monde, Nicolas Bouvier  (English version - The Way of the World)

# data[].attributes.body
Adventure, Self-Discovery, A different time

# data[].attributes.body
Inspiring Artworld Gossip

# data[].attributes.body
Timely post-Soviet tragedy

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
ON BROTHERS AND SISTERS, VICTIMS AND EXECUTIONERS... AND THE ELECTORATE
Alexander Porfirievich Sharpilo, retired, 63 years old
AS TOLD BY HIS NEIGHBOUR, MARINA TIKHONOVNA ISAICHIK

Strangers, what do you want, coming here? People keep coming and coming. Well, death never comes for no reason, there's always a reason. Death will find a reason.
He burned alive on his vegetable patch, among his cucumbers... Poured acetone over his head and lit a match. I was sitting here watching TV when suddenly I heard screaming. An old person's voice... a familiar voice, like Sashka's... and then another, younger voice. A student had been walking past, there's a technical college nearby, and there he was, a man on fire. What can you say! He ran over, started trying to put him out. Got burned himself. By the time I got outside, Sashka was on the ground, moaning... his head all yellow... You're not from around here, what do you care? What do you need a stranger's grief for?
Everyone wants a good look at death. Ooh! Well... In our village, where I lived with my parents before I was married, there was an old man who liked to come and watch people die. The women would shame him and chase him away: 'Shoo, devil!' but he'd just sit there. He ended up living a long time. Maybe he really was a devil! How can you watch? Where do you look... in what direction? After death, there is nothing. You die and that's it - they bury you. But when you're alive, even if you're unhappy, you can walk around in the breeze or stroll through the garden. When the spirit leaves, there's no person left, just the dirt. The spirit is the spirit and everything else is just dirt. Dirt and nothing else. Some die in the cradle, others live until their hair goes grey. Happy people don't want to die... and those who are loved don't want to die, either. They beg to stay on longer. But where are these happy people? On the radio, they'd said that after the war was over, we would all be happy, and Khrushchev, I remember, promised... he said that communism would soon be upon us. Gorbachev swore it, too, and he spoke so beautifully... it had sounded so good. Now Yeltsin's making the same promises. He even threatened to lie down on the train tracks... I waited and waited for the good life to come. When I was little, I waited for it... and then when I got a little older... Now I'm old. To make a long story short, everyone lied and things only ever got worse. Wait and see, wait and suffer. Wait and see... My husband died. He went out, collapsed, and that was that - his heart stopped. You couldn't measure it or weigh it, all the trouble we've seen. But here I am, still alive. Living. My children all scattered: my son is in Novosibirsk, and my daughter stayed in Riga with her family, which, nowadays, means that she lives abroad. In a foreign country. They don't even speak Russian there any more.
I have an icon in the corner and a little dog so that there's someone to talk to. One stick of kindling won't start a fire, but I do my best. Oh... It's good of God to have given man cats and dogs... and trees and birds... He gave man everything so that he would be happy and life wouldn't seem too long. So life wouldn't wear him down. The one thing I haven't gotten sick of is watching the wheat turn yellow. I've gone hungry so many times that the thing I love best is ripening grain, seeing the sheaves swaying in the wind. For me, it's as beautiful as the paintings in a museum are for you... Even now, I don't hanker after white bread - there's nothing better than salted black bread with sweet tea. Wait and see... and then wait some more... The only remedy we know for every kind of pain is patience. Next thing you know, your whole life's gone by. That's how it was for Sashka... Our Sashka... He waited and waited and then he couldn't take it any longer. He got tired. The body lies in the earth, but the soul has to answer for everything. [ She wipes her tears.] That's how it is! We cry down here... and when we die, we cry then, too...
People have started believing in God again because there is no other hope. In school, they used to teach us that Lenin was God and Karl Marx was God. The churches were used to store grain and stockpile beets. That's how it was until the war came. War broke out... Stalin reopened the churches so prayers would be said for the victory of Russian arms. He addressed the people: 'Brothers and sisters... My friends...' And what had we been before that? Enemies of the people... Kulaks and kulak sympathizers... In our village, all of the best families were subjected to dekulakization; if they had two cows and two horses, that was already enough to make them kulaks. They'd ship them off to Siberia and abandon them in the barren taiga forest... Women smothered their children to spare them the suffering. Oh, so much woe... so many tears... More tears than there is water on this Earth. Then Stalin goes addressing his 'brothers and sisters'... we believed him. Forgave him. And defeated Hitler! He showed up with his tanks... gleaming and iron-plated... and we defeated him anyway! But what am I today? Who are we now? We're the electorate... I watch TV, I never miss the news... we're the electorate now. Our job is to go and vote for the right candidate then call it a day. I was sick one time and didn't make it to the polling station, so they drove over here themselves. With a red box. That's the one day they actually remember us... Yep...
We die how we lived... I even go to church and wear a little cross, but there has never been any joy in my life, and there isn't any now. I never got any happiness. And now even praying won't help. I just hope that I get to die soon... I hope the heavenly kingdom hurries up and comes, I'm sick of waiting. Just like Sashka... He's in the graveyard now, resting. [ She crosses herself.] They buried him with music, with tears. Everyone wept. Many tears are shed on that day, people feel sorry for you. But what's the point of repenting? Who can hear us after death? All that's left of him are two rooms in a barracks house, a vegetable patch, some red certificates, and a medal: 'Victor of Socialist Emulation'. I have a medal just like that in my cabinet. I was a Stakhanovite* and a deputy. There wasn't always enough to eat, but there were plenty of red certificates. They'd hand you one and take your picture. Three families live together in this barracks. We moved in when we were young, we thought it would only be for a year or two, but we ended up spending our entire lives here. And we'll die in this barracks, too. For twenty, for thirty years... people were on the waiting list for an apartment, putting up with this... Then, one day, Gaidar comes and laughs in our faces: Go ahead and buy one! With what money? Our money evaporated... one reform, then another... We were robbed! What a country they flushed down the toilet! Every family had had two little rooms, a small shed, and a vegetable patch. We were exactly the same. Look at all the money we made! We're rich! We spent our whole lives believing that one day, we would all live well. It was a lie! A great big lie! And our lives... better not to remember what they were like... We endured, worked and suffered. Now we're not even living any more, we're just waiting out our final days.

[...]

Second-hand Time is the latest work from Svetlana Alexievich, winner of the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature. Here she brings together the voices of dozens of witnesses to the collapse of the USSR in a formidable attempt to chart the disappearance of a culture and to surmise what new kind of man may emerge from the rubble. Fashioning a singular, polyphonic literary form by combining extended individual monologues with a collage of voices, Alexievich creates a magnificent requiem to a civilization in ruins, a brilliant, poignant and unique portrait of post-Soviet society out of the stories of ordinary women and men.

Praise for Svetlana Alexievich

'In this spellbinding book, Svetlana Alexievich orchestrates a rich symphony of Russian voices telling their stories of love and death, joy and sorrow, as they try to make sense of the twentieth century, so tragic for their country.'
- J. M. Coetzee, winner of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature

'Absolutely fantastic.'
- Karl Ove Knausgaard

'The non-fiction volume that has done the most to deepen the emotional understanding of Russia during and after the collapse of the Soviet Union of late is Svetlana Alexievich's oral history Second-hand Time.'
- David Remnick, New Yorker

' Second-Hand Time is [Alexievich's] most ambitious work: many women and a few men talk about the loss of the Soviet idea, the post-Soviet ethnic wars, the legacy of the Gulag, and other aspects of the Soviet experience. ... Through her books and her life itself, Alexievich has gained probably the world's deepest, most eloquent understanding of the post-Soviet condition.'
- Masha Gessen, New Yorker

'The people she talks to, the co-authors of her books, are working people, women and elderly people - precisely those who are left behind. ... Alexievich's voices are those of the people no one cares about, but the ones whose lives constitute the vast majority of what history actually is. ... This is history, major history, but written, as all history should be, from below.'
- Keith Gessen, Guardian

'A series of monologues by people across the former Soviet empire, it is Tolstoyan in scope, driven by the idea that history is made not only by major players but also by ordinary people talking in their kitchens.'
- Rachel Donadio, New York Times

'Alexievich's work follows the strands of thought and emotion wherever her voices take her - through nightmares, but also flashes of joy ... The work is unique in the intimacy of the experience transmitted through the writing: which is, after all, only the ability to have a human ear, to listen, and to publish.'
- John Lloyd, Financial Times

'I am engrossed in Svetlana Alexievich's extraordinary Second-hand Time, an oral tapestry of post-Soviet Russia.'
- Julian Barnes, Guardian

' Second-hand Time is, at one of its many levels, about what the Soviet Union was and what its legacy still means. [Alexievich] writes a new form of history unlike anything that goes before ... reading her deep exploration of what a Russian world would be without the myths of nationalism, I realised I had in my hands a book that transcends its geography and makes it essential reading in Brexit Britain.'
- Rachel Holmes, Guardian

'[A] stunning chorale.'
- Marcel Theroux, Guardian

'[An] epic fresco of an empire's bitter aftermath. ... Alexievich retreats into the wings to let her subjects speak. But this is the art that conceals art. Her editor's flair for selection, contrast and emphasis, her almost cinematic touch with cuts, pans and close-ups, make her a documentary virtuoso and not a transcription machine.'
- Boyd Tonkin, Spectator

'The firsthand accounts here offer a dizzyingly complex and contradictory look into what it was like to be a subject of the Great Socialist Experiment.'
- Wall Street Journal

'[ Second-hand Time is] hailed as Alexievich's masterpiece - not only for what it says about the fall of the Soviet Union but for what it suggests about the future of Russia and its former satellites.'
- Tobias Grey, Newsweek

'The narratives Alexievich has sculpted take place in landlocked settings and yet, in Bela Shayevich's English translation, they come at the reader in thunderous waves, churned from oceans of history. This book - important without sounding self-important - is heart-breaking and impossible to put down.'
- Max Liu, Independent

'Her subjects argue with and lie to themselves; nearly everyone talks about love and loss in the context of war, hunger, betrayal, financial ruin, and emotional collapse. Yet with little intrusion from Alexievich and Shayevich's heroic translation, each voice stands on its own, joining the tragic polyphony that unfolds chapter by chapter and gives expression to intense pain and inner chaos.'
- Publishers Weekly

' Second-hand Time is a testamentary record, a safe-keep of Russians' beliefs and feelings as they existed in our time. Ms. Alexievich's format of revealing history through individual stories feels more nuanced and more perceptive than conventional histories, a result that validates her conviction that it is at the individual level "where everything really happens."'
-

'For both the author and the reader, this landmark novel is a way to make sense of the dramatic changes that defined life in the Soviet and post-Soviet world.'
- Calvert Journal

Svetlana Alexievich was born in Ivano-Frankovsk in 1948 and has spent most of her life in the Soviet Union and present-day Belarus, with prolonged periods of exile in Western Europe. Starting out as a journalist, she developed her own non-fiction genre which brings together a chorus of voices to describe a specific historical moment. Her works include The Unwomanly Face of War (1985), Last Witnesses (1985), Boys in Zinc (1991), Chernobyl Prayer (1997) and Second-hand Time (2013). She has won many international awards, including the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature for 'her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time'.

Bela Shayevich is a Soviet-American artist and translator.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
ON BROTHERS AND SISTERS, VICTIMS AND EXECUTIONERS... AND THE ELECTORATE Alexander Porfirievich Sharpilo, retired, 63 years old AS TOLD BY HIS NEIGHBOUR, MARINA TIKHONOVNA ISAICHIK Strangers, what do you want, coming here? People keep coming and coming. Well, death never comes for no reason, there's always a reason.

# data[].attributes.body
Horrific, Inspiring Memorable

# data[].attributes.body
Fairly easy read, and useful for someone getting to understand biology

# data[].attributes.body
Beyond comprehension, unsettling

# data[].attributes.headline
The Scottish Enlightenment by Arthur Herman

# data[].attributes.subject
The Scottish Enlightenment by Arthur Herman

# data[].attributes.body
uncompromising, dogmatic, driven

# data[].attributes.body
Scottish Future Fiction

# data[].attributes.body
Detective, psychic, intriguing

# data[].attributes.body
Datarific!

# data[].attributes.body
Peaceful and engaging

# data[].attributes.body
Classic American Punk

# data[].attributes.body
Discover beauty of imperfection

# data[].attributes.body
Enjoyable Glasgow crime thriller

# data[].attributes.body
Ridiculous. Cosmic. Escapism.

# data[].attributes.body
Long-awaited sequel

# data[].attributes.body
Relatable, funny, legend

# data[].attributes.attachment_caption
Somhairle MacGill-Eain (Sorley MacLean); Collected Poems

# data[].attributes.body
Lyrical; complex; rich

# data[].attributes.body
Eye-opener, self-improvement, significant.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Let Me Tell You More About The Book...

Atomic Habits is the most comprehensive and practical guide on how to create good habits, break bad ones, and get 1 percent better every day. I do not believe you will find a more actionable book on the subject of habits and improvement.

If you're having trouble changing your habits, the problem isn't you. The problem is your system.

Bad habits repeat themselves not because you don't want to change but because you have the wrong system for change. This is one of the core philosophies of Atomic Habits: You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems. In this book, you'll get a proven plan that can take you to new heights.

James Clear, one of the world's leading experts on habit formation, is known for his ability to distill complex topics into simple behaviors that can be easily applied to daily life and work. Here, he draws on the most proven ideas from biology, psychology, and neuroscience to create an easy-to-understand guide for making good habits inevitable and bad habits impossible.

Along the way, readers will be inspired and entertained with true stories about Olympic gold medalists, award-winning artists, business leaders, life-saving physicians, and star comedians who have used the science of small habits to master their craft and vault to the top of their field.

Atomic Habits will reshape the way you think about progress and success and give you the tools and strategies you need to transform your habits-whether you are a team looking to win a championship, an organization hoping to redefine an industry, or simply an individual who wishes to quit smoking, lose weight, reduce stress, and achieve success that lasts.

Browse our selection of the best Atomic Habits quotes or read the official Atomic Habits summary here.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Packed with evidence-based strategies, Atomic Habits will teach you how to make small changes that will transform your habits and deliver amazing results.

# data[].attributes.body
Unexpected; quirky; transformative

# data[].attributes.body
Complex but moving

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Targeting cookies are used to make advertising messages more relevant to you and your interests. They perform functions like preventing the same content from reappearing, ensuring ads are displayed and, in some cases, selecting content based on your interests. See More.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Stunningly-designed new editions of Toni Morrison's best-known novels, published by Vintage Classics in celebration of her life and work. WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY NAMWALI SERPELL, AUTHOR OF THE OLD DRIFT As young girls in a poor but close-knit community, Nel and Sula are inseparable.

# data[].attributes.body
Strange; funny; gripping

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Andrew Key

Andrew Key was born in Shrewsbury in 1989. He studied at the University of Sussex and the University of California, Berkeley. Ross Hall is his first book; his essays, criticism and other writings have appeared in various publications and his Roland Barfs online film diary is widely followed. He lives in Sheffield and works in mental health social care.

ROSS HALL
Andrew Key

In January 1766, fleeing persecution, Jean-Jacques Rousseau arrived in England with his long-suffering companion Thérèse Levasseur. While resident for some eighteen months in the Staffordshire village of Wootton, Rousseau began and may have completed Part One of The Confessions. It was an unhappy time for all concerned. Rousseau was in great physical discomfort and psychological torment. Deeply paranoid, he believed that friends old and new - led by his benefactor, the philosopher David Hume, who had accompanied him on his journey from France to England - were part of an international conspiracy to discredit him.

This strange and difficult sojourn is brilliantly reimagined by Andrew Key in the pages of Ross Hall.

"Andrew Key's exquisitely perceptive novel is both a psychological study and a
fable. At its centre is a mind at work on thoughts whose cycling it can't - or
won't - arrest. It's the mind of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, churning worry, courage,
and yearning through mostly gloomy or even inhospitable weather, though sun
and joy break through from time to time. Late in his life and longing for peace
and freedom, Rousseau is offered refuge in rural England, and there he finds
himself the troubled captive of his own thinking. Hoping to inspire people to
offer 'the full honest revelation of their complete natural self', he seeks to do so
himself. In the process, he reveals himself to be grand, pathetic, brilliant, clueless,
and heroic. And Key is discovered to be one of the great young writers of the
twenty-first century, a compassionate as well as adventurous thinker."
- LYN HEJINIAN, author of My Life and Positions of the Sun

978-1-874400-84-4 190pp MARCH 2022

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Andrew Key was born in Shrewsbury in 1989. He studied at the University of Sussex and the University of California, Berkeley. Ross Hall is his first book; his essays, criticism and other writings have appeared in various publications and his Roland Barfs online film diary is widely followed.

# data[].attributes.body
Edinburgh. Ghosts. Funny

# data[].attributes.body
Hilarious - Uplifting - Genius

# data[].attributes.body
Couldn't. Put. Down.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
UK EDITION

AMERICAN EDITION

Here's the blurb:

Between life and death there is a library, and within that library, the shelves go on forever. Every book provides a chance to try another life you could have lived. To see how things would be if you had made other choices . . . Would you have done anything different, if you had the chance to undo your regrets?"

A dazzling novel about all the choices that go into a life well lived, from the internationally bestselling author of Reasons to Stay Alive and How To Stop Time.

Somewhere out beyond the edge of the universe there is a library that contains an infinite number of books, each one the story of another reality. One tells the story of your life as it is, along with another book for the other life you could have lived if you had made a different choice at any point in your life. While we all wonder how our lives might have been, what if you had the chance to go to the library and see for yourself? Would any of these other lives truly be better?

In The Midnight Library, Matt Haig's enchanting new novel, Nora Seed finds herself faced with this decision. Faced with the possibility of changing her life for a new one, following a different career, undoing old breakups, realizing her dreams of becoming a glaciologist; she must search within herself as she travels through the Midnight Library to decide what is truly fulfilling in life, and what makes it worth living in the first place.
PRAISE FOR THE BOOK
"I can't describe how much his work means to me. So necessary...[Matt Haig is] the king of empathy" - Jameela Jamil, actor and host of I Weigh with Jameela Jamil

"A beautiful fable, an It's a Wonderful Life for the modern age - impossibly timely when we are all stuck in a world we wish could be different." - Jodi Picoult, author of My Sister's Keeper

"An absorbing but comfortable read...a vision of limitless possibility, of new roads taken, of new lives lived, of a whole different world available to us somehow, somewhere, might be exactly what's wanted in these troubled and troubling times." - The New York Times

"When unemployed, loveless, depressed Nora Seed's cat dies, it's the last straw. The talented aspiring Olympic swimmer turned aspiring rock star now aspires only to stop living. Then she wakes up in a mysterious library filled with books of other lives she might have led and an invitation from the librarian, Mrs. Elm, to enter their pages. This brainy, captivating pleasure read feels like what you might get if TV's The Good Place collided with Where'd You Go, Bernadette." - People

"Clever, emotional and thought-inspiring." - Jenny Colgan, author of The Bookshop on the Corner

"Amazing and utterly beautiful, The Midnight Library is everything you'd expect from the genius storyteller who is Matt Haig." - Joanna Cannon, author of The Trouble with Goats and Sheep

"Nora's life is burdened by regrets. Then she stumbles on a library with books that enable her to test out the lives she could have led, including as a glaciologist, Olympic swimmer, rock star, and more. Her discoveries ultimately prove life-affirming in Matt Haig's dazzling fantasy." - Christian Science Monitor

"Charming...a celebration of the ordinary: ordinary revelations, ordinary people, and the infinity of worlds seeded in ordinary choices." - The Guardian

"A brilliant premise and great fun." - Daily Mail

"An uplifting, poignant novel about regret, hope and second chances" - David Nicholls, author of One Day

"Would we really make better choices if we could step back in time? Matt Haig's thought-provoking, uplifting new book, The Midnight Library discusses just that, exploring our relationship with regret and what really makes a perfect life." - Harper's Bazaar (UK)

"British author Matt Haig is beloved in his home country, and he's a champion of mental health, which makes him a great person to follow on Twitter. He's best known for the novel How to Stop Time, but he has a new novel just out on September 29 called The Midnight Library, which sounds equally intriguing. In this library, Nora Seed finds endless books which contain different versions of the life she could have lived. This is a must-read for those of us given to endless what ifs." - BookRiot

"Haig is one of the most inspirational popular writers on mental health of our age and, in his latest novel, he has taken a clever, engaging concept and created a heart-warming story that offers wisdom in the same deceptively simple way as Mitch Albom's best tales." - Independent (UK)

"Just beautiful . . . Such a gorgeous, gorgeous book." - Fearne Cotton, host of the BBC Radio 1 Chart Show

"[The Midnight Library] will follow in the bestselling footsteps of Haig's earlier books . . . Part Sliding Doors, part-philosophical quest, this is a moving novel with a powerful mental health message at its heart." - Alice O'Keeffe, The Bookseller

"Haig's latest (after the nonfiction collection Notes on a Nervous Planet, 2019) is a stunning contemporary story that explores the choices that make up a life, and the regrets that can stifle it. A compelling novel that will resonate with readers." - Booklist (starred review)

"Charming...[Matt Haig] will reward readers who take this book off the shelf." - Publisher's Weekly

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
UK EDITION AMERICAN EDITION Here's the blurb: Between life and death there is a library, and within that library, the shelves go on forever. Every book provides a chance to try another life you could have lived. To see how things would be if you had made other choices .

# data[].attributes.body
Intriguing; Gripping; Page-Turner

# data[].attributes.body
Lively, suspenseful, emotional.