Babies: our biggest mystery and our most natural consequence, our hardest test and our enduring love. Anne Enright describes the intensity, bewilderment and extravagant happiness of her experience of having babies, from the exhaustion of early pregnancy to first smiles and becoming acquainted with the long reaches of the night. Everyone, from parents to the mildly curious, can delight in Enright’s funny, eloquent and unsentimental account of having babies.

Selected from the book Making Babies by Anne Enright

VINTAGE MINIS: GREAT MINDS. BIG IDEAS. LITTLE BOOKS.

A series of short books by the world’s greatest writers on the experiences that make us human

Also in the Vintage Minis series:
Fatherhood by Karl Ove Knausgaard
Motherhood by Helen Simpson
Drinking by John Cheever
Sisters by Louisa May Alcott

Professor Robert Plomin, the world’s leading geneticist, said in 2014 of his search for genes that explain differences in our psychology: ‘I have been looking for these genes for fifteen years. I don’t have any’.

Using a mixture of famous and ordinary people, Oliver James drills deep down into the childhood causes of our individuality, revealing why our upbringing, not our genes, plays such an important role in our wellbeing and success. The implications are huge: as adults we can change, we can clutch our fates from predetermined destiny, as parents we can radically alter the trajectory of our childrens’ lives, and as a society we could largely eradicate criminality and poverty.

Not in Your Genes will not only change the way you think about yourself and the people around you, but give you the fuel to change your personality and your life for the better.

Step back from the overload and find some time for yourself.

You are important too.

With encouraging reminders, inspiring thoughts, easy wins and practical advice, The Little Book of Self Care will help you identify your needs so you can relax, refuel and find calm in your hectic life.

This book will tell you why mindset is key, how to nourish instead of punish yourself, how to exercise and sleep and why it is important to go slow sometimes.

You live your whole life being you, so why not be your own best friend?

THE NUMBER ONE BESTSELLER

This Modern Love is a unique crowdsourced book of letters, stories, and photographs about the state of modern romance by YouTuber Will Darbyshire.

‘Question 1. What would you say to your ex, without judgement?’

Seeking closure after a tough break-up, Will Darbyshire was driven to strike up an intimate conversation with his online audience. Posting a series of questions via his YouTube, Twitter and Instagram channels, Will asked his followers to share their innermost thoughts about their relationship experiences, in the form of hand-written letters, poems, photographs, and emails.

After 6 months and over 15,000 heartfelt submissions later, from over 100 countries, This Modern Love collects these letters together to form a compendium of 21st century love, structured into the beginning, middle and end of a relationship.

Tender, funny and cathartic, This Modern Love is a compelling portrait of individual desires, resentments and fears that reminds us that, whether we're in or out of love, we're not alone.

This set of 36 postcards features beautiful artwork from Magical Jungle, illustrator and ink evangelist Johanna Basford's wondrous expedition through the leafy wilderness. Colour in the postcards to bring to life speckled tree frogs and dainty hummingbirds, prowling tigers and playful monkeys. Share the magic with your friends – that is, if you can bear to post them! Each postcard is an invitation to an exotic rainforest teeming with creatures large and small. For explorers of all ages.

"The link between our biomes, gut bacteria and our overall health is the final frontier of medicine that we must now embrace if we are ever to advance as a profession ... This book comes at the perfect time!"
Dr Christian Jessen, presenter of 'Embarrassing Bodies' and 'Supersize vs. Superskinny'

From your weight, to how you age, to allergies and diseases - your gut controls it all.

In Gut Reactions, leading scientists Justin and Erica Sonnenberg explain how we've neglected this vital organ for far too long. As well as the consequences you might expect - a dramatic rise in food intolerances and inflammatory bowel diseases - are a whole host of other concerns, such as an increase in cancer, asthma, autism and diabetes.

We now have only 1,200 species of microbes living in our gut. We used to have many more. Why are these species becoming extinct? And how do we prevent it?

With recipes and meal plans, as well as guidance on alternatives to antibiotics and lifestyle choices, Gut Reactions will help you to interpret, understand and incorporate these new radical findings into your diet and lifestyle and will help you on your journey to a healthier gut.

PREVIOUSLY PUBLISHED AS THE GOOD GUT

We’re all living faster, working harder, and often so busy we forget to take a moment to sit back, close our eyes and just, breathe. Yet this hectic lifestyle can get us down, making us lethargic, stressed and burnt out. So how to break the cycle?

Inspired by traditional eastern lessons of meditation and mindfulness, neuroscience and insights from literature, Emma Mills offers fresh and simple tools to keep our minds healthy, from that early morning coffee through to the moment you climb into bed, without having to invest in expensive detox courses or far-flung retreats. She guides the reader through a course of a single day, with easy tips, meditations, recipes, literary recommendations and practical takeaways that can be completed in a matter of minutes.

So just inhale, exhale, and repeat – and let a sense of calm and focus transform your day.

THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

'A witty, elegant and unsentimental meditation on the business of getting old' THE TIMES

The notorious baby boomers are approaching the end and starting to plan their final moves in the game of life. ‘What was that all about?’ they’re asking. ‘Was it about acquiring things or changing the world? Was it about keeping all your marbles? Or is the only thing that counts after you’re gone the reputation you leave behind?’ In Old Age: a beginner’s guide, Michael Kinsley answers the questions we are all forced to confront sooner or later.

'One of the year’s most arresting, humbling and acute memoirs. It is a catch-in-the-throat, life-affirming work that you want to gulp down in one and recommend to all your friends. Fitzmaurice tells her story in sparkling prose that is as sinewy as her new sea-strengthened body, and as admirable and boundless as her spirit' Sunday Times

Ruth’s tribe are her lively children and her filmmaker husband, Simon, who has Motor Neurone Disease and can only communicate with his eyes. Ruth’s other ‘tribe’ are the friends who gather at the cove in Greystones, Co. Wicklow, and regularly throw themselves into the freezing cold water, just for kicks.

‘The Tragic Wives’ Swimming Club’, as they jokingly call themselves, meet to cope with the extreme challenges life puts in their way, not to mention the monster waves rolling over the horizon. Swimming is just one of the daily coping strategies as Ruth fights to preserve the strong but now silent connection with her husband. As she tells the story of their marriage, via diagnosis to their current precarious situation, Ruth also charts her passion for sea swimming – culminating in a midnight swim under the full moon on her wedding anniversary.

An invocation to all of us to love as hard as we can, and live even harder, I Found My Tribe is an urgent and uplifting letter to a husband, family, friends, the natural world and the brightness of life.

What are you grateful for? This original, design-led gratitude journal provides the tools you need to discover a more meaningful, hopeful and happier way of living.

Featuring gratitude logs, creative exercises, playful prompts, uplifting quotes and free-flow pages, this simple, three-stage programme will inspire, empower, and improve your happiness and well being. Developed and designed by leading creative organisation PATTERNITY using their unique insight and research. Complete with a stylish flexi-cover case and beautiful paper for writing.

THIS IS NOT A PARENTING MANUAL. THIS IS REAL LIFE.

The Unmumsy Mum writes candidly about motherhood like it really is: the messy, maddening, hilarious reality, how there is no ‘one size fits all’ approach and how it is sometimes absolutely fine to not know what you are doing. The lessons she's learnt while grappling with two small boys – from birth to teething, 3am night feeds to toddler tantrums, soft play to toilet training – will have you roaring with laughter and taking great comfort in the fact that it's definitely not just you...

A family story of exceptional power and universal relevance - about loss, about carrying on, and about recovering a brother's life and death.

Life changes in an instant.

On a family summer holiday in Cornwall in 1978, Nicholas and his brother Richard are jumping in the waves. Suddenly, Nicholas is out of his depth. He isn’t, and then he is. He drowns.

Richard and his other brothers don’t attend the funeral, and incredibly the family return immediately to the same cottage – to complete the holiday, to carry on. They soon stop speaking of the catastrophe. Their epic act of collective denial writes Nicky out of the family memory.

Nearly forty years later, Richard Beard is haunted by the missing grief of his childhood but doesn’t know the date of the accident or the name of the beach. So he sets out on a pain-staking investigation to rebuild Nicky’s life, and ultimately to recreate the precise events on the day of the accident. Who was Nicky? Why did the family react as they did? And what actually happened?

The Day That Went Missing is a heart-rending story as intensely personal as any tragedy and as universal as loss. It is about how we make sense of what is gone. Most of all, it is an unforgettable act of recovery for a brother.

Over 18 million people in the UK alone have Non-alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease (NAFLD), and many of them don't even know they have it.

As the name implies, this has little to do with the alcohol you drink and everything to do with lifestyle factors that we all have the power to change – if we know how to. Everyone is talking about gut health, and cleanses are so ubiquitous that we are now over the very word, but what about our original cleansing, detoxing, seat-of-all health organ, the liver?

Award-winning dietitian Kristin Kirkpatrick and hepatologist Dr. Ibrahim Hanouneh have teamed up for a life-changing program that will help you achieve optimal health. Skinny Liver's four-week program shares the steps you can take to get your liver health back on track, with everything from exercise to healthy eating and other lifestyle changes, along with delicious liver-friendly recipes. Written by two experts in the field and based on the latest research, Skinny Liver is an authoritative, easy-to-follow guide to health and wellness, not just for your most essential organ, but for your whole body.

The scientific reality is that 90 per cent of the signs of ageing and disease are caused by lifestyle choices, not your genes. In other words, you have the capability to overcome and transform your genetic history and tendencies. Harvard/MIT-trained physician Sara Gottfried, M.D. has created a revolutionary 7-week programme that empowers us to make the critical choices necessary to not just look young, but also feel young.

Dr. Gottfried identifies and builds this book around the five key factors that lead to accelerated aging: the muscle factor, the brain factor, the hormone factor, the gut factor, and the toxic fat factor. The 7-week program addresses these factors and treats them in an accessible and highly practical protocol.

Dr. Gottfried’s programme makes it possible to change the way you age, stay younger longer, and remain healthy and vibrant for all of your days.

From Facebook's COO and Wharton’s top-rated professor, the #1 New York Times best-selling authors of Lean In and Originals: a powerful, inspiring, and practical book about building resilience and moving forward after life’s inevitable setbacks.

After the sudden death of her husband, Sheryl Sandberg felt certain that she and her children would never feel pure joy again. “I was in ‘the void,’” she writes, “a vast emptiness that fills your heart and lungs and restricts your ability to think or even breathe.” Her friend Adam Grant, a psychologist at Wharton, told her there are concrete steps people can take to recover and rebound from life-shattering experiences. We are not born with a fixed amount of resilience. It is a muscle that everyone can build.

Option B combines Sheryl’s personal insights with Adam’s eye-opening research on finding strength in the face of adversity. Beginning with the gut-wrenching moment when she finds her husband, Dave Goldberg, collapsed on a gym floor, Sheryl opens up her heart―and her journal―to describe the acute grief and isolation she felt in the wake of his death. But Option B goes beyond Sheryl’s loss to explore how a broad range of people have overcome hardships including illness, job loss, sexual assault, natural disasters, and the violence of war. Their stories reveal the capacity of the human spirit to persevere . . . and to rediscover joy.

Resilience comes from deep within us and from support outside us. Even after the most devastating events, it is possible to grow by finding deeper meaning and gaining greater appreciation in our lives. Option B illuminates how to help others in crisis, develop compassion for ourselves, raise strong children, and create resilient families, communities, and workplaces. Many of these lessons can be applied to everyday struggles, allowing us to brave whatever lies ahead. Two weeks after losing her husband, Sheryl was preparing for a father-child activity. “I want Dave,” she cried. Her friend replied, “Option A is not available,” and then promised to help her make the most of Option B.

We all live some form of Option B. This book will help us all make the most of it.

Feeling sluggish, bloated and in desperate need of rejuvenation?

Enter Chris James's unique plan to restore energy, acuity and cleanse your whole body, starting with the seat of all health - the gut.

By targeting three key areas and showing you the impacts they can have on your body and mind, Chris's holistic method will show you exactly what your body needs and how to nourish it, using:

- Diet: menu plans, delicious cleansing recipes, juices, suggestions and tips for eating vegan;
- Mindfulness: how to use mindfulness to help you focus on what exactly your body needs;
- Yoga: simple and specific twists to stimulate peristalsis and digestion, inversions to stimulate the lymphatic system, backbends to stimulate gut health.

You've heard of cleanses, the power of mindfulness and the importance of gut health; now combine them for the first time with Chris's Mind Body Cleanse. In just 12 days you'll feel lighter, brighter and glowing with health.

Who doesn't want to be more popular? Surely a person's popularity - be it at school, work or socially - is the best predictor of how happy and successful they can be?

The truth is actually much more complex. This impeccably researched and highly entertaining book presents two very distinct types of popularity and shows how only one of them will get us where we want.

Based on 20 years of research and written by popularity expert Mitch Prinstein, Popular investigates the science of what popularity is, why we care about it so much – even if we don’t think we do – what kind of popularity is worth caring about, and if we can still get the popularity we want, even if we didn't have it when we were younger. Prinstein also offers important insights on parenting for popularity, explaining why supporting children in the right way will help them cultivate the right kind of popularity and help shape them positively as adults in the future.

The number one book for today's parents-to-be, Conception, Pregnancy and Birth is widely accepted as the childbirth bible

Have all your questions answered by top parenting expert Dr Miriam Stoppard, Britain's most popular and trusted

Join the clean beauty revolution that’s taking the nation by storm and discover the delights of making your own beauty products in the comfort of your own home. Gone are the days of paying a premium for fancy-pants moisturizers and toners, whose ingredients read like a chemistry lesson. The Clean Beauty girls challenge you to take control over what you put on your skin and hair by making it yourself!

Green and clean beauty is growing up, and the London-based Clean Beauty Co are leading the way with luxury beauty recipes packed full of only the good stuff. Scrub that bad day away with a coffee body scrub, or take a long restorative bath with a coconut milk soak. Perhaps you fancy fixing those split ends with a banana split hair mask. Whatever the problem, the Clean Beauty girls have a homemade recipe that you can whip up in no time. So what are you waiting for? Join the revolution today!

This book provides a glimpse into the life and work of Robert Langer, an amazing scientist, inventor and entrepreneur. Growing up in Albany, New York, Langer developed a passion for mathematics. While he was pretty good at science, he was very good at math. He went on to receive his BA in chemical engineering from Cornell University and his Doctorate of Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As a graduate student at MIT, he was involved in teaching underprivileged high school dropouts, his goal: to make math and science interesting.Langer's research laboratory at MIT is the largest biomedical engineering lab in the world. He has authored more than 1300 papers and holds more than 1080 patents. His patents have been licensed or sublicensed to more than 250 companies. A selection of 53 key papers and 50 patents are included in this book.Langer has pioneered many new technologies, including controlled release system and is regarded as the founder of tissue engineering in the field of regenerative medicine. However, his success did not come easily. He struggled in the late 1970s and early 1980s because scientists, especially established scientists, did not believe in his research. To obtain his first patent, Langer scoured existing literature and found a paper published by five famous chemists and chemical engineers that said his results were surprising and went against conventional thinking. He managed to get the patent after the five researchers confirmed that they really wrote the paper.The introductory chapter of the book gives an account of Langer's struggles as well as triumphs as he pursued research in biotechnology and tissue engineering in an effort to 'make the world a better place and transform human healthcare.' The book will appeal to both students and scientists.