Showing results by publisher "Fourth Estate" in Relationships, Parenting & Personal Development

Growing up, Elizabeth wanted to make everyone like her. Lacking friends at school, she grew up to believe that quantity equalled quality. Having lots of friends meant you were loved, popular and safe. She was determined to become a Good Friend. And, in many ways, she did. But in adulthood she slowly realised that it was often to the detriment of her own boundaries and mental health. Then, when a global pandemic hit in 2020, she was one of thousands of people forced to reassess what friendship really meant to them—with the crisis came a dawning realisation.

From an unconventional upbringing in Baltimore, to an unconventional marriage to one of the most famous men in the world, adhering to the status quo has never been a familiar road for Jada Pinkett Smith. In Worthy, Smith strips herself of all the labels and stories crafted by others, and reclaims her narrative with radical self-love. Worthy teaches us who Jada is, and how to embrace our most authentic loveable souls.

We are all familiar with the hormones, the illogical rage, the awful time keeping and the daily dramarama. However, you don’t know that they will steal your stuff (and claim you never had it in the first place), bruise your self-esteem just as you hit your melancholy midlife and love/hate you all day long with exhausting regularity seconds after turning 13. This stage of motherhood is not for the fainthearted. These are the loneliest of maternal times filled with pockets of shame you cannot share with anyone. You’re going to need help getting through this.

Whether at work, home or in our relationships, we all know how it feels to want people to like us. The problem comes when we give up our own needs along the way. In this life-changing book, psychotherapist Emma Reed Turrell explains the different ‘types’ of people-pleaser and provides practical, reassuring advice on how to better understand - and stop - people-pleasing behaviour when it starts to affect your own needs. Please Yourself will help you care for others in the right way - and ultimately, help you take better care of yourself.

Growing up on the Falls Road in 1990s Belfast, Alix O'Neill has seen it all—burnt-out buses blocking the route to school, the police mistaking her father for a leading terrorist and a classmate playing hide-and-seek with her dad's prosthetic hand (blown off making a device for the IRA). Not that she or her friends are up to speed with the goings-on of the resistance. They’re too preoccupied with the obsessions of every teenage girl—booze, boys and Boyzone—to worry about the violence on their doorstep.

Do you wish you had more confidence in yourself? Are your friendships changing as you get older and you’re not sure how manage it? Is your career unfulfilling or taking over your life? These are the kinds of issues that Toni Tone explores in her audiobook. Threading in her own experiences, and in particular, what she took away from her twenties, Toni provides genuine and insightful advice on a whole array of topics.

In this powerful, poignant memoir Sam triangulates her own experience with the stories of two other carers, one she admires and one, on some days, she fears she might become: Leonard Woolf, husband to Virginia and F Scott Fitzgerald, husband to Zelda, and a man whose personality made him ill-equipped – in a great many ways – to be a carer for his troubled wife. A mesmerising blend of literary biography and memoir The Fragments of My Father is a compelling and moving account of what it means to be a carer.

From Hadley Freeman, the bestselling author of House of Glass, comes her searing and powerful memoir about mental ill health and her experience with anorexia. This is how the Anorexia Speak worked in my head: ‘Boys like girls with curves on them’ – If you ever eat anything you will be mauled by thuggish boys with giant paws for hands. ‘Don’t you get hungry?’ – You are so strong and special, and I envy your strength and specialness. ‘Have you tried swimming? I find that really improves my appetite’ – You need to do more exercise.

A creature of routine and decorum, Mrs March lives an exquisitely controlled existence on the Upper East Side. Every morning begins the same way, with a visit to her favourite patisserie to buy a loaf of olive bread, but her latest trip proves to be her last when she suffers an indignity from which she may never recover: an assumption by the shopkeeper that the protagonist in George March’s new book - a pathetic sex worker, more a figure of derision than desire - is based on Mrs March.

A standalone work of nonfiction by the bestselling author of Treacle Walker, Powsels and Thrums is a distillation of a lifetime of work. It blends family history, folklore, stories and poetry, bringing to life the language and landscape of Garner’s beloved Cheshire. Full of charm and insight, this book is a celebration of the writer’s life, values and language.

Helen Russell is an expert on the pursuit of happiness. In How to Be Sad, she combines her powerful personal story with surprising research and warm advice to reveal the secret of finding joy: allowing sadness to enrich your life and relationships. Timely and essential, this book is about how we can better look after ourselves and each other, simply by getting smarter about sadness.

In Failosophy: A Handbook for When Things Go Wrong, Elizabeth Day, author of How to Fail and creator of the award-winning podcast of the same name, brings together all the lessons she has learned from her own life, from conversations with her podcast guests - including Malcolm Gladwell, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Lemn Sissay, Nigel Slater, Emeli Sande, Meera Syal, Dame Kelly Holmes, Andrew Scott and many, many more - and from meeting readers and listeners who have shared their stories with her.

Mathematics is full of better ways of thinking, and with more than 2,000 years of knowledge to draw on, Oxford mathematician Marcus du Sautoy interrogates his passion for shortcuts in this fresh and fascinating guide. After all, shortcuts have enabled so much of human progress, whether in constructing the first cities around the Euphrates 5,000 years ago, using calculus to determine the scale of the universe or today’s algorithms that help us find a new life partner.

On 10th June 2020, the scholar James Nwoye Adichie died suddenly in Nigeria. In this tender and powerful essay, expanded from the original New Yorker text, his daughter, a self-confessed daddy's girl, remembers her beloved father. Notes on Grief is at once a tribute to a long life of grace and wisdom, the story of a daughter's fierce love for a parent and a revealing examination of the layers of loss and the nature of grief.

Toni Tone is here to give the big sister advice we all need: discovering what we want from a connection, flourishing through heartbreak and learning the vital importance of difficult conversations for growth and self-respect. Speaking from a place of experience and empathy, she talks through the value of intuition, asking questions and taking responsibility for the choices we make, offering practical, simple advice to improve any relationship and insight into our own behaviours.

In November 2021, Ghislaine Maxwell was convicted of five counts of sex-trafficking of minors, and now faces 55 years in prison for the role she played in Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse of four girls. The trial was meticulously covered by journalist and legal reporter Lucia Osborne-Crowley, one of only four reporters allowed into the courtroom every day. The Lasting Harm is her account of that trial, a gripping true crime drama and a blistering critique of a criminal justice system ill-equipped to deliver justice for abuse survivors, no matter the outcome.

Clinical psychology Dr Meg Jay sounds the alarm about a problem which has reached epidemic proportions: the over-prescription of antidepressants and anti-anxiety drugs to young people who are in many cases going through normal developmental challenges. Psychologist, Dr Meg Jay makes the point that our twenties are the most challenging time of life and why over-medicating isn’t the answer to the mental health problems facing young people. She goes onto advise how young people can develop the skills needed to navigate work, love, friendship, mental health, and more during that decade and beyond.

A worldwide best seller, translated into more than 12 languages, The Female Eunuch is a landmark in the history of the women’s movement. Drawing liberally from history, literature and popular culture, past and present, Germaine Greer’s searing examination of women’s oppression is at once an important social commentary and a passionately argued masterpiece of polemic. Probably the most famous, most widely read book on feminism ever.

After a decade of living in Denmark and raising a family there, Helen Russell noticed that Nordic children are different. They eat differently. They learn differently. They run, jump and climb out in nature for hours a day, even though the weather is terrible and it's dark October to March. And then they grow up to be some of the happiest adults on the planet. Her question was: how? In How to Raise a Viking, Russell takes a deep dive into the parenting culture of Denmark and the other Nordic nations.

In The Smallest Lights in the Universe, MIT astrophysicist Sara Seager interweaves the story of her search for meaning and solace after losing her first husband to cancer, her unflagging search for an Earth-like exoplanet and her unexpected discovery of new love. Sara Seager has made it her life's work to peer into the spaces around stars - looking for exoplanets outside our solar system, hoping to find the one-in-a-billion world enough like ours to sustain life. But with the unexpected death of her husband, her life became an empty, lightless space.