Listen and Learn! The Sound of General Ignorance brings you all the best bits of the number one bestseller The Book of General Ignorance in handy audio form.

The Second Sex caused uproar when it appeared in 1949. Simone de Beauvoir sets out groundbreaking ideas on what it meant to be a woman, charting the oppression of "the second sex." She argued that gender identity was shaped by upbringing in a world ruled by men, and her most startling thesis became a rallying cry for the feminist movement: "One is...

A memoir of love, death and jazz chickens, Eddie Izzard's fabulous Believe Me is his one and only autobiography . . . 'I know why I'm doing all this,' I said. 'Everything I do in life is trying to get her back. I think if I do enough things . . . that maybe she'll come back.' When Eddie Izzard was six, he and his brother Mark lost their mother. Tha...

Penguin presents the unabridged, downloadable audiobook edition of Berlin by Antony Beevor, read by Peter Nobel. Berlin: The Downfall 19145 is Antony Beevor's brilliant account of the fall of the Third Reich. The Red Army had much to avenge when it finally reached the frontiers of the Reich in January 1945. Political instructors rammed home the mes...

Penguin presents the unabridged, downloadable audiobook edition of Captivate: The Science of Succeeding with People written and read by Vanessa Van Edwards. Wish you knew exactly what to say in awkward social situations? Or that you had a formula for charisma? You need to know how people work. As a human behaviour investigator, Vanessa Van Edwards...

A three way encounter between a Monk, a neuroscientist and Ruby Wax sounds like the set up for a joke. Instead it's produced one of the most fascinating, intriguing and informative books about minds and bodies and brains and mindfulness I've ever encountered. A triangulation on what it means to be human. Utterly readable and surprisingly wise. Neil...

A searingly powerful memoir about the impact of addiction on a family In the summer of 2012 a woman named Eva was found dead in the London townhouse she shared with her husband, Hans K. Rausing. The couple had struggled with drug addiction for years, often under the glare of tabloid headlines. Now, writing with singular clarity and restraint the ed...

Nick Frost burst onto our screens in a blaze of camo fatigues and weaponry in the hit cult comedy Spaced. Since then, fans around the world have watched him with a fervent devotion as he fought zombies, rescued aliens and salsa'd his way to box office smash after smash. It's quite a story. But it's not this story. This story isn't the romp from mov...

From the first time he was stopped and searched as a child, to the day he realised his mum was white, to his first encounters with racist teachers - race and class have shaped Akala's life and outlook. In this unique book he takes his own experiences and widens them out to look at the social, historical and political factors that have left us where...

Can a person literally die of loneliness? Is there a connection between the ability to express emotions and Alzheimer's disease? Is there such a thing as a 'cancer personality'? Drawing on deep scientific research and Dr Gabor Mat‚'s acclaimed clinical work, When the Body Says No provides the answers to critical questions about the mind-body...

The effects of trauma can be devastating for sufferers, their families and future generations. Here one of the world's experts on traumatic stress offers a bold new paradigm for treatment, moving away from standard talking and drug therapies and towards an alternative approach that heals mind, brain and body.

In l978 Sontag wrote Illness As Metaphor. A cancer patient herself at the time, she shows how the metaphors and myths surrounding certain illnesses, especially cancer, add greatly to the suffering of the patients and often inhibit them from seeking proper treatment. By demystifying the fantasies surrounding cancer, Sontag shows cancer for what it i...

Filled with stories, poems, and guidelines, Soulcraft introduces over forty practices that facilitate the descent to soul, including dreamwork, wilderness vision fasts, talking across the species boundaries, council, self-designed ceremony, nature-based shadow work, and the arts of romance, being lost, and storytelling.

Falling pregnant as a teenager in 1952, Philomena Lee was sent to the convent in Co. Tipperary to be looked after as a fallen woman. She cared for her baby for three years until the Church took him and sold him, like countless others, to America for adoption. She spent the next fifty years secretly searching for him, unaware that he was searching f...

A searing account of George Orwell's observations of working-class life in the bleak industrial heartlands of Yorkshire and Lancashire in the 1930s. Graphically unforgettable descriptions of social injustice, cramped slum housing, dangerous mining conditions, hunger and unemployment are written with unblinking honesty, fury and great humanity. It c...

This is award-winning novelist Hilary Mantel's uniquely unusual five-part autobiography. Opening with 'A Second Home', in which Mantel describes the death of her stepfather, Giving Up the Ghosts is a wry, shocking and beautifully-written memoir of childhood, ghosts (real and metaphorical), illness and family. Finally, at the memoir's conclusion, Ma...

Random House Audiobooks presents the audiobook of HELP. Read by Simon Amstell and packed full of live recordings taken from his stand up tours. COMEDY, TRAGEDY, THERAPY. Simon Amstell did his first stand-up gig at the age of thirteen. His parents had just divorced and puberty was confusing. Trying to be funny solved everything. Read by Simon Amstel...

On the eve of his 36th birthday, author Mike Gayle picked up a pen and contemplated his life. He is nowhere near being an adult-even though his tenth wedding anniversary is looming and his second child due shortly. Appalled by this lack of maturity, Mike draws up a to-do list containing every item he's been meaning to do but keeps putting off...

Will You Love Me? tells the true story of Cathy's adopted daughter Lucy, who was born to a single mother who couldn't cope, and was taken into permanent foster care aged 8. By the time Lucy was fostered with Cathy she was severely distressed, withdrawn, refusing to eat and three years behind at school. But Cathy and her two children bond with Lucy...

Acclaimed historian Alison Weir looks into the life of the first Tudor queen, revealing the woman behind the image Elizabeth of York would have ruled England, but for the fact that she was a woman. One of the key figures of the Wars of the Roses, daughter of Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville, she married Henry Tudor to bring peace to a war-torn Eng...

An introverted, unusual young boy, isolated by his obsessions and a loner at school, Chris Packham was only at home in the fields and woods around his suburban home. But when he stole a young kestrel from its nest, he was about to embark on a friendship that would teach him what it meant to love, and that would change him forever. In his rich, lyri...