The #1 New York Times bestseller that has all America talking—with a new afterword on expanding your range—as seen on CNN's Fareed Zakaria GPS, Morning Joe, CBS This Morning, and more. “The most important business—and parenting—book of the year.” —Forbes “Urgent and important. . . an essential read for bosses, parents, coaches, and anyone who cares about improving performance.” —Daniel H. Pink Shortlisted for the Financial Times/McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award Plenty of experts argue that anyone who wants to develop a skill, play an instrument, or lead their field should start early, focus intensely, and rack up as many hours of deliberate practice as possible. If you dabble or delay, you’ll never catch up to the people who got a head start. But a closer look at research on the world’s top performers, from professional athletes to Nobel laureates, shows that early specialization is the exception, not the rule. David Epstein examined the world’s most successful athletes, artists, musicians, inventors, forecasters and scientists. He discovered that in most fields—especially those that are complex and unpredictable—generalists, not specialists, are primed to excel. Generalists often find their path late, and they juggle many interests rather than focusing on one. They’re also more creative, more agile, and able to make connections their more specialized peers can’t see. Provocative, rigorous, and engrossing, Range makes a compelling case for actively cultivating inefficiency. Failing a test is the best way to learn. Frequent quitters end up with the most fulfilling careers. The most impactful inventors cross domains rather than deepening their knowledge in a single area. As experts silo themselves further while computers master more of the skills once reserved for highly focused humans, people who think broadly and embrace diverse experiences and perspectives will increasingly thrive.

In a fragile alliance, the natives are stirring uneasily under their foreign rulers. Rebellion is brewing, and at the heart of the conflict lies the bloody and powerful cult of the god Aoun, whose followers will stop at nothing to rid their land of alien domination. So civil servant Renille vo Chaumelle, scion of a proud, conquering line mingled with native blood, is conscripted as a spy and ordered to penetrate the fortress-temple known as the Fastness of the Gods. There he is to discover the secrets of the priests of Aoun and - if the chance presents itself - assassinate the lead priest, named in legend as the god's own son. But in the holiest depths of the temple, Renille finds there is more to the cult than his superiors suspect - far more than they will ever believe. What he learns leads him to the beautiful princess Jathondi, daughter of the native ruler, who is fated to be the crux of a violent confrontation between the fanatic followers of a flesh-hungry god and their arrogant overlords. Together, Jathondi and Renille must brave a whirlwind of revolution and apocalyptic magic that could shatter a nation, and open the long-sealed portal between heaven and earth.

From the bestselling author of A Ladder to the Sky—“a darkly funny novel that races like a beating heart” (People)—comes a new novel that plays out across all of human history: a story as precise as it is unlimited. This story starts with a family. For now, it is a father and a mother with two sons, one with his father’s violence in his blood, one with his mother’s artistry. One leaves. One stays. They will be joined by others whose deeds will determine their fate. It is a beginning. Their stories will intertwine and evolve over the course of two thousand years. They will meet again and again at different times and in different places. From Palestine at the dawn of the first millennium and journeying across fifty countries to a life among the stars in the third, the world will change around them, but their destinies remain the same. It must play out as foretold. From the award-winning author of The Heart’s Invisible Furies comes A Traveler at the Gates of Wisdom, an epic tale of humanity. The story of all of us, stretching across two millennia. Imaginative, unique, heartbreaking, this is John Boyne at his most creative and compelling.

#1 New York Times bestseller “Barry will teach you almost everything you need to know about one of the deadliest outbreaks in human history.”—Bill Gates "Monumental... an authoritative and disturbing morality tale."—Chicago Tribune The strongest weapon against pandemic is the truth. Read why in the definitive account of the 1918 Flu Epidemic. Magisterial in its breadth of perspective and depth of research, The Great Influenza provides us with a precise and sobering model as we confront the epidemics looming on our own horizon. As Barry concludes, "The final lesson of 1918, a simple one yet one most difficult to execute, is that...those in authority must retain the public's trust. The way to do that is to distort nothing, to put the best face on nothing, to try to manipulate no one. Lincoln said that first, and best. A leader must make whatever horror exists concrete. Only then will people be able to break it apart." At the height of World War I, history’s most lethal influenza virus erupted in an army camp in Kansas, moved east with American troops, then exploded, killing as many as 100 million people worldwide. It killed more people in twenty-four months than AIDS killed in twenty-four years, more in a year than the Black Death killed in a century. But this was not the Middle Ages, and 1918 marked the first collision of science and epidemic disease.

Now a major Lifetime movie event, from New York Times bestselling author and literary phenomenon V.C. Andrews (Flowers in the Attic, My Sweet Audrina) comes the fourth installment in the classic story of the Casteel family saga. Stunned by tragedy, a young woman finds herself desperate and alone, and clinging to the frailest of dreams. Can Heaven’s daughter find the inner strength to survive? The car crash that killed Heaven and Logan left Annie Casteel Stonewall orphaned and crippled. Whisked off to Farthinggale Manor by the possessive Tony Tatterton, Annie pines for her lost family, but especially for Luke, her half-brother. Friend of her childhood, her fantasy prince, her loving confidante…without the warm glow of Luke’s love, she is lost in the shadows of despair. When Annie discovers Troy’s cottage hidden in Farthinggale’s woods, the mystery of her past deepens. And even as she yearns to see Luke again, her hopes and dreams are darkened by the sinister Casteel spell…treacherous, powerful, and evil.

After the sudden death of her birth parents, Marina Roeswood meets her Aunt Arachne, who is to be her new guardian. Slowly Marina realizes that her aunt is the embodiment of the danger her parents had been hiding her from in the backwoods of Cornwall. But can Marina unravel the secrets of her life in time to save herself from the evil that had been seeking her for nearly eighteen years?

On growing up in the American South of the 1960s—an all-American white boy—son of a long line of Methodist preachers, in the midst of the civil rights revolution, and discovering the culpability of silence within the church. By the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and columnist for The Birmingham News. "My dad was a Methodist preacher and his dad was a Methodist preacher," writes John Archibald. "It goes all the way back on both sides of my family. When I am at my best, I think it comes from that sermon place." Everything Archibald knows and believes about life is "refracted through the stained glass of the Southern church. It had everything to do with people. And fairness. And compassion." In Shaking the Gates of Hell, Archibald asks: Can a good person remain silent in the face of discrimination and horror, and still be a good person? Archibald had seen his father, the Rev. Robert L. Archibald, Jr., the son and grandson of Methodist preachers, as a moral authority, a moderate and a moderating force during the racial turbulence of the '60s, a loving and dependable parent, a forgiving and attentive minister, a man many Alabamians came to see as a saint. But was that enough? Even though Archibald grew up in Alabama in the heart of the civil rights movement, he could recall few words about racial rights or wrongs from his father's pulpit at a time the South seethed, and this began to haunt him. In this moving and powerful book, Archibald writes of his complex search, and of the conspiracy of silence his father faced in the South, in the Methodist Church and in the greater Christian church. Those who spoke too loudly were punished, or banished, or worse. Archibald's father was warned to guard his words on issues of race to protect his family, and he did. He spoke to his flock in the safety of parable, and trusted in the goodness of others, even when they earned none of it, rising through the ranks of the Methodist Church, and teaching his family lessons in kindness and humanity, and devotion to nature and the Earth. Archibald writes of this difficult, at times uncomfortable, reckoning with his past in this unadorned, affecting book of growth and evolution.