Awakenings

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Unless I am allowed to tell the story of my life in my own way, I cannot tell it at all
Mary Seacole – traveller, nurse, businesswoman and radical for her time – defied a prejudiced British government to care for soldiers wounded during the Crimean War.
This ground breaking account, written by Seacole in 1857, brings to life her incredible journey from Jamaica to Central America and England, and then on to modern-day Ukraine, where she acted as nurse to injured soldiers while running her business, the 'British Hotel'. A witness to key battles, she gives vivid accounts of how she coped with disease, bombardment and other adversities during the Crimean War.
In this extraordinary autobiography, Seacole shows how she navigated her way through racial injustice, poverty and ignorance to become the first woman of colour in Britain to publish her memoirs. It is a testament to her enduring legacy.

**SUNDAY TIMES AND THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER**

'An epoch-defining book' Matt Haig
'If you read just one work of non-fiction this year, it should probably be this' David Sexton, Evening Standard
It is worse, much worse, than you think.
The slowness of climate change is a fairy tale, perhaps as pernicious as the one that says it isn't happening at all, and if your anxiety about it is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible, even within the lifetime of a teenager today.
Over the past decades, the term "Anthropocene" has climbed into the popular imagination - a name given to the geologic era we live in now, one defined by human intervention in the life of the planet. But however sanguine you might be about the proposition that we have ravaged the natural world, which we surely have, it is another thing entirely to consider the possibility that we have only provoked it, engineering first in ignorance and then in denial a climate system that will now go to war with us for many centuries, perhaps until it destroys us. In the meantime, it will remake us, transforming every aspect of the way we live-the planet no longer nurturing a dream of abundance, but a living nightmare.

Book by Mukherjee, Siddhartha

'Oliver Sacks is a perfect antidote to the anaesthetic of familiarity. His writing turns brains and minds transparent' Observer How does the brain perceive and interpret information from the eye? And what happens when the process is disrupted? In The Mind's Eye, Oliver Sacks tells the stories of people who are able to navigate the world and communicate with others despite losing what many of us consider indispensable senses and abilities: the capacity to recognize faces, the sense of three-dimensional space, the ability to read, the sense of sight. For all of these people, the challenge is to adapt to a radically new way of being in the world and The Mind's Eye is testament to the myriad ways that we, as humans, are capable of rising to this challenge. 'The Mind's Eye is about the possibility of recovery and the inexorable decline of the ageing individual. From this collision of incompatible truths, tragedy is made ...making this Sacks's most powerful book to date' Sunday Telegraph 'Packed with wisdom, humour, extraordinary human stories and reflections on how we all perceive the world ...He ends with a brilliant discussion of blindness and the ways in which blind people develop visual concepts. Heartily recommended' Reader's Digest