Digital Minimalism: On Living Better with Less Technology
| by Cal Newport

The urge to pick up our phones every few minutes has become a nervous twitch that shatters our time into shards too small to be present. Our addiction to tech leaves us feeling exhausted and overwhelmed. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

In this timely book, professor Cal Newport shows us how to pair back digital distractions and live better with less technology.

Introducing us to digital minimalists — the calm, happy people who can hold long conversations without furtive glances at their phones or obsessively document everything they eat — Newport reveals how to live more intentionally in our tech-saturated world.

By following a thirty-day ‘digital declutter’ process, you’ll learn to:

– Rethink your relationship with social media.
– Prioritize ‘high bandwidth’ conversations over low-quality text chains.
– Rediscover the pleasures of the offline world.

Take back control from your devices and become a digital minimalist.

Lifespan: Why We Age – and Why We Don’t Have To
| by David A. Sinclair

It’s a seemingly undeniable truth that ageing is inevitable. But what if everything we’ve been taught to believe about ageing is wrong? What if we could choose our lifespan?

In this groundbreaking book, Dr David Sinclair, leading world authority on genetics and longevity, reveals a bold new theory for why we age. As he writes: “Aging is a disease, and that disease is treatable.”

This book takes us to the frontlines of research many from Dr David Sinclair’s own lab at Harvard—that demonstrate how we can slow down, or even reverse, ageing. The key is activating newly discovered vitality genes, the descendants of an ancient genetic survival circuit that is both the cause of ageing and the key to reversing it.

The Book Thief
| by Markus Zusak

It is 1939. Nazi Germany. The country is holding its breath.

Death has never been busier and will become busier still.

By her brother’s graveside, Liesel’s life is changed when she picks up a single object, partially hidden in the snow. It is The Gravedigger’s Handbook, left there by accident, and it is her first act of book thievery.

So begins a love affair with books and words, as Liesel, with the help of her accordion-playing foster father, learns to read. Soon she is stealing books from Nazi book-burnings, the mayor’s wife’s library, wherever there are books to be found. But these are dangerous times. When Liesel’s foster family hides a Jewish fist-fighter in their basement, Liesel’s world is both opened up and closed down.

The Book Thief is a story about the power of words to make worlds. In superbly crafted writing that burns with intensity, award-winning author Markus Zusak has given us one of the most enduring stories of our time.

Conversations with Friends
| by Sally Rooney

Frances is twenty-one years old, cool-headed and darkly observant. A college student in Dublin and aspiring writer, she works at a literary agency by day. At night, she performs spoken word with her best friend Bobbi, who used to be her girlfriend. When they are profiled by Melissa, a well-known journalist, they enter an exotic orbit of beautiful houses, raucous dinner parties and holidays in Provence.

Initially unimpressed, Frances finds herself embroiled in a risky ménage a quatre when she begins an affair with Nick, Melissa’s actor husband. Desperate to reconcile herself to the desires and vulnerabilities of her body, Frances’s intellectual certainties begin to yield to something new – a painful and disorienting way of living from moment to moment. But as Frances tries to keep control, her relationships increasingly unspool: with Nick, with her difficult and unhappy father, and finally even with Bobbi.

Written with rare precision and probing intelligence, Conversations with Friends is exquisitely alive to the pleasures and inhibitions of youth.