Renowned Harvard scholar and New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore has written a strikingly original, ingeniously conceived, and beautifully crafted history of American ideas about life and death from before the cradle to beyond the grave. How does life begin? What does it mean? What happens when we die? “All anyone can do is ask,” Lepore writes. “That’s why any history of ideas about life and death has to be, like this book, a history of curiosity.” Lepore starts that history with the story of a seventeenth-century Englishman who had the idea that all life begins with an egg, and ends it with an American who, in the 1970s, began freezing the dead. In between, life got longer, the stages of life multiplied, and matters of life and death moved from the library to the laboratory, from the humanities to the sciences. Lately, debates about life and death have determined the course of American politics. Each of these debates has a history. Investigating the surprising origins of the stuff of everyday life—from board games to breast pumps—Lepore argues that the age of discovery, Darwin, and the Space Age turned ideas about life on earth topsy-turvy. “New worlds were found,” she writes, and “old paradises were lost.” As much a meditation on the present as an excavation of the past, The Mansion of Happiness is delightful, learned, and altogether beguiling.

Rueful, tender visions of the Apocalypse as seen from the Midwest

Robin Ekiss's meditations on memory and mortality are a canary in the coal mine of imagination. With disembodied dolls, dank Parisian catacombs, the gilded interior of a Fabergé egg, and the unfathomable edge of Niagara Falls as the dominion of these poems, reading Ekiss's work is like peering into the perfectly still world of a diorama or daguerreotype: an experience both uncanny and uncompromising.

Three little mice. Three very different houses. But which is the happiest home?A timely tale about discovering true happiness and appreciating all that you have - with flaps to lift and peep-through pages.

In this important, entertaining book, one of the world's most celebrated psychologists, Martin Seligman, asserts that happiness can be learned and cultivated, and that everyone has the power to inject real joy into their lives. In Authentic Happiness, he describes the 24 strengths and virtues unique to the human psyche. Each of us, it seems, has at least five of these attributes, and can build on them to identify and develop to our maximum potential. By incorporating these strengths - which include kindness, originality, humour, optimism, curiosity, enthusiasm and generosity -- into our everyday lives, he tells us, we can reach new levels of optimism, happiness and productivity. Authentic Happiness provides a variety of tests and unique assessment tools to enable readers to discover and deploy those strengths at work, in love and in raising children. By accessing the very best in ourselves, we can improve the world around us and achieve new and lasting levels of authentic contentment and joy.

When a family moves into a remote high-tech mansion equipped with next-generation artificial intelligence that can control the house’s every function—a buried secret leads to terrifying and catastrophic consequences. Nellie is programmed to be the perfect digital assistant. But something sinister lurks in her source code—and now she’s the perfect killer. When Billy Stafford and his wife move into their house designed with every comfort in mind, he thinks it will be the perfect chance to work on their marriage and to restart his career. A brilliant computer engineer fallen on hard times, Billy’s been hired by his former business partner to test out Nellie: a cutting-edge artificial intelligence program hardwired into the house. All Billy has to do is fix a few bugs in the system, which sounds easy enough. But as winter settles in and Billy and his wife are left alone in the woods, a dark reality begins to emerge. Nellie’s problems are much worse than a few technology glitches. Infused with the sinister history of the mansion and her own creator’s sins, she has, in fact, become a killing machine. And the only way to escape is to give her what she wants… A gripping technothriller about AI gone rogue, The Mansion is “a thrilling story that combines modern technology with old fears” (Shelf Awareness).

From New York Times Bestseller, Pepper Winters, comes the third and final book in Kas and Gem’s fated romance. A stranger full of rage. A battle that has no victors. A decision that has to be made. And a future that has to be fought for. Scarred and learning how to live again, Kas might never be free of his darkness. A life full of triggers is no life at all. But a love full of pain can only grant heartache. Gem made the decision to stay, but at what cost? Kas made the choice to claim her, but will he ever be worthy? To love is the simplest choice. But healing is the hardest struggle of all.