Cross.

THE SUNDAY TIMES NUMBER ONE BESTSELLER ?A vital book about dying. Awe-inspiring and exquisite. Obligatory reading for the living? Nigella Lawson At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade?s training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, the next he was a patient struggling to live. When Breath Becomes Air chronicles Kalanithi?s transformation from a medical student asking what makes a virtuous and meaningful life into a neurosurgeon working in the core of human identity ? the brain ? and finally into a patient and a new father. What makes life worth living in the face of death? What do you do when when life is catastrophically interrupted? What does it mean to have a child as your own life fades away? Paul Kalanithi died while working on this profoundly moving book, yet his words live on as a guide to us all. When Breath Becomes Air is a life-affirming reflection on facing our mortality and on the relationship between doctor and patient, from a gifted writer who became both.SHORTLISTED FOR THE WELLCOME BOOK PRIZE 2017

Eckhart Tolle is emerging as one of today’s most inspiring teachers. In The Power of Now, already a word-of-mouth bestseller in Canada, the author describes his transition from despair to self-realization soon after his 29th birthday. Tolle took another ten years to understand this transformation, during which time he evolved a philosophy that has parallels in Buddhism, relaxation techniques, and meditation theory but is also eminently practical. In The Power of Now he shows readers how to recognize themselves as the creators of their own pain, and how to have a pain-free existence by living fully in the present. Accessing the deepest self, the true self, can be learned, he says, by freeing ourselves from the conflicting, unreasonable demands of the mind and living present, fully, and intensely, in the Now.

***********************The phenomenal international bestseller – 100 million copies of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series sold worldwide.One of the Bookseller’s 30 most influential books of the last 30 years.”What a cracking novel! I haven’t read such a stunning thriller debut for years. Brilliantly written and totally gripping” Minette WaltersWith an Introduction by Val McDermidForty years ago, Harriet Vanger disappeared from a family gathering on the island owned and inhabited by the powerful Vanger clan. Her body was never found, yet her uncle is convinced it was murder – and that the killer is a member of his own tightly knit but dysfunctional family. He employs disgraced financial journalist Mikael Blomkvist and the tattooed, truculent computer hacker Lisbeth Salander to investigate. When the pair link Harriet’s disappearance to a number of grotesque murders from forty years ago, they begin to unravel a dark and appalling family history. But the Vangers are a secretive clan, and Blomkvist and Salander are about to find out just how far they are prepared to go to protect themselves.Stieg Larsson’s groundbreaking trilogy is continued in The Girl in the Spider’s Web, The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye and The Girl Who Lived Twice by David Lagercrantz

The Sahara: a dream-like, far away landscape of Lawrence of Arabia and Wilfred Thesiger, The English Patient and Star Wars, and home to nomadic communities whose ways of life stretch back millennia. Today it’s a teeth-janglingly dangerous destination, where the threat of jihadists lurks just over the horizon. Following in the footsteps of 16th century traveller Leo Africanus, Nicholas Jubber went on a turbulent adventure to the forgotten places of North Africa and the legendary Timbuktu.Once the seat of African civilization and home to the richest man who ever lived, this mythic city is now scarred by terrorist occupation and is so remote its own inhabitants hail you with the greeting, ‘Welcome to the middle of nowhere’. From the cattle markets of the Atlas, across the Western Sahara and up the Niger river, Nicholas joins the camps of the Tuareg, Fulani, Berbers, and other communities, to learn about their craft, their values and their place in the world.The Timbuktu School for Nomads is a unique look at a resilient city and how the nomads pit ancient ways of life against the challenges of the 21st century.