"A young drama teacher in the West of Scotland suffers deep psychological problems which affect all areas of her life. She fails to find meaning in anything around her, but in her search she strips situations of their conventional values and sees them in a sharp, new light." --Publisher's description.

From her earliest years with a boozy, accident-prone father and a reluctantly pragmatic mother, Janice Galloway's grew up as a watcher - careful and vigilant. Then her parents' marriage broke up and mother and daughter moved to an attic above a doctor's surgery. When her big sister Cora returned home, with her steady stream of boyfriends, snappy dress sense and matching temper, evasion became a way of life. This is a funny and telling book about the routine dependencies and confusions, hopes and triumphs of childhood; it is also a book about emergence, as, slowly, the beginnings of unsuspected rage pushed the silent girl towards her voice.

A New York Times Bestseller A Washington Post Notable Nonfiction Book of 2020 Named a Best Book of 2020 by NPR “A fascinating scientific, cultural, spiritual and evolutionary history of the way humans breathe—and how we’ve all been doing it wrong for a long, long time.” —Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Big Magic and Eat Pray Love No matter what you eat, how much you exercise, how skinny or young or wise you are, none of it matters if you’re not breathing properly. There is nothing more essential to our health and well-being than breathing: take air in, let it out, repeat twenty-five thousand times a day. Yet, as a species, humans have lost the ability to breathe correctly, with grave consequences. Journalist James Nestor travels the world to figure out what went wrong and how to fix it. The answers aren’t found in pulmonology labs, as we might expect, but in the muddy digs of ancient burial sites, secret Soviet facilities, New Jersey choir schools, and the smoggy streets of São Paulo. Nestor tracks down men and women exploring the hidden science behind ancient breathing practices like Pranayama, Sudarshan Kriya, and Tummo and teams up with pulmonary tinkerers to scientifically test long-held beliefs about how we breathe. Modern research is showing us that making even slight adjustments to the way we inhale and exhale can jump-start athletic performance; rejuvenate internal organs; halt snoring, asthma, and autoimmune disease; and even straighten scoliotic spines. None of this should be possible, and yet it is. Drawing on thousands of years of medical texts and recent cutting-edge studies in pulmonology, psychology, biochemistry, and human physiology, Breath turns the conventional wisdom of what we thought we knew about our most basic biological function on its head. You will never breathe the same again.

This inventive first novel explores the widespread problem of female depression. A 27-year-old drama teacher named Joy Stone is losing her grip on the world. The problems of everyday living accumulate and begin to torture the narrator, who blames her problems not on her work or on the accidental death of her illict lover, but on herself. She reads horoscopes, plucks hairs, holds conversations inside and outside herself. A terrible memory tries to unfold but is resisted. Family and friends take on monstrous or pitiful guises; food threatens to become a major character. Clutching at the wrong things, the trick is to find those that let life go on. As things seen, things bought, and things said become obsessions, so the author conjures up the homely or horrifying world of litter in which the reader, like the heroine, lives.

An amusing driving holiday in France by two Scottish spinsters who are on each other's nerves from the moment they cross the Channel. Faced with the dilemma of "fancying men and not liking them very much," they ponder alternatives as they endure one tourist nightmare after another.

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLING PHENOMENOM 'I've never felt so alive' JOE WICKS 'The book will change your life' BEN FOGLE My hope is to inspire you to retake control of your body and life by unleashing the immense power of the mind. 'The Iceman' Wim Hof shares his remarkable life story and powerful method for supercharging your strength, health and happiness. Refined over forty years and championed by scientists across the globe, you'll learn how to harness three key elements of Cold, Breathing and Mindset to master mind over matter and achieve the impossible. 'Wim is a legend of the power ice has to heal and empower' BEAR GRYLLS 'Thor-like and potent...Wim has radioactive charisma' RUSSELL BRAND

Collection of poems about school. Suggested level: primary.