It S Not Raining Daddy It S Happy

The Sunday Times bestseller The moving and inspiring account of heartbreak and courage, and the life-affirming relationship between a father and son. Ben Brooks-Dutton's wife - the great love of his life - was knocked down and killed by a car as he walked beside her, pushing their two-year-old son in his buggy. Life changed forever. Suddenly Ben was a widower deep in shock, left to raise their bewildered child alone. In the aftermath Ben searched for guidance from men in similar situations, but it appeared that young widowed fathers don't talk. Well meaning loved ones admired his strength. The unwritten rule seemed to be to 'shut up, man up and hide your pain'. Lost, broken and afraid of the future, two months after his wife Desreen's death, Ben started a blog with the aim of rejecting outdated conventions of grief and instead opening up about his experiences. Within months Life as a Widower, had received a million hits and had started an all-too-often hushed conversation about the reality of loss and grief. This is the story of a man and a child who lost the woman they so dearly love and what happened in the year that followed. Ben describes the conflicting emotions that come from facing grief head on. He rages against the clichés used around loss and shows the strange and cruel ways in which grief can take hold. He also charts what it means to become a sole parent to a child who has lost their mother and cannot yet understand the meaning of death. Through the shock and sadness shine moments of hope and insight. So much of what Ben learns comes from watching his son struggle, survive and live, as children do, from moment to moment where hurt can turn to happiness and anger can turn to joy. This is a story of loss, heartbreak and courage. At its heart is the funny, infuriating and life affirming relationship between a father and son and their ongoing love for an extraordinary woman.

Consumer vulnerability is of growing importance as a research topic for those exploring wellbeing. This book provides space to critically engage with the conditions, contexts and characteristics of consumer vulnerability, which affect how people experience and respond to the marketplace and vice versa. Focussing on substantive, ethical, social and methodological issues, this book brings together key researchers in the field and practitioners who work with vulnerability on a daily basis. Organised into 4 sections, it considers consumer vulnerability and key life stages, health and wellbeing, poverty, and exclusion. Methodologically the chapters draw on qualitative research, employing a variety of methods from interview, to the use of poetry, film and other cultural artefacts. This book will be of interest to marketing and consumer research scholars and students and also to researchers in other disciplines including sociology, public policy and anthropology, and practitioners, policy makers and charitable organisations working with vulnerable groups.

We are becoming less intelligent. This is the shocking yet fascinating message of At Our Wits' End. The authors take us on a journey through the growing body of evidence that we are significantly less intelligent now than we were a hundred years ago. The research proving this is, at once, profoundly thought-provoking, highly controversial, and it’s currently only read by academics. But the authors are passionate that it cannot remain ensconced in the ivory tower any longer. With At Our Wits’ End, they present the first ever popular scientific book on this crucially important issue. They prove that intelligence — which is strongly genetic — was increasing up until the breakthrough of the Industrial Revolution, because we were subject to the rigors of Darwinian Selection, meaning that lots of surviving children was the preserve of the cleverest. But since then, they show, intelligence has gone into rapid decline, because large families are increasingly the preserve of the least intelligent. The book explores how this change has occurred and, crucially, what its consequences will be for the future. Can we find a way of reversing the decline of our IQ? Or will we witness the collapse of civilization and the rise of a new Dark Age?

Vital Memory and Affect takes as its subject the autobiographical memories of ‘vulnerable’ groups, including survivors of child sexual abuse, adopted children and their families, forensic mental health service users, and elderly persons in care home settings. In particular the focus is on a particular class of memory within this group: recollected episodes that are difficult and painful, sometimes contested, but always with enormous significance for a current and past sense of self. These ‘vital memories’, integral and irreversible, can come to appear as a defining feature of a person’s life. In Vital Memory and Affect, authors Steve Brown and Paula Reavey explore the highly productive way in which individuals make sense of a difficult past, situated as they are within a highly specific cultural and social landscape. Via an exploration of their vital memories, the book combines insights from social and cognitive psychology to open up the possibility of a new approach to memory, one that pays full attention to the contextual conditions of all acts of remembering. This path-breaking study brings together a unique set of empirical material and maps out an agenda for research into memory and affect that will be important reading for students and scholars of social psychology, memory studies, cultural studies, philosophy, and other related fields.

From the New York Times bestselling author Kristin Hannah comes a powerful novel of love, loss, and the magic of friendship. . . . now a #1 Netflix series! In the turbulent summer of 1974, Kate Mularkey has accepted her place at the bottom of the eighth-grade social food chain. Then, to her amazement, the "coolest girl in the world" moves in across the street and wants to be her friend. Tully Hart seems to have it all---beauty, brains, ambition. On the surface they are as opposite as two people can be: Kate, doomed to be forever uncool, with a loving family who mortifies her at every turn. Tully, steeped in glamour and mystery, but with a secret that is destroying her. They make a pact to be best friends forever; by summer's end they've become TullyandKate. Inseparable. So begins Kristin Hannah's magnificent new novel. Spanning more than three decades and playing out across the ever-changing face of the Pacific Northwest, Firefly Lane is the poignant, powerful story of two women and the friendship that becomes the bulkhead of their lives. From the beginning, Tully is desperate to prove her worth to the world. Abandoned by her mother at an early age, she longs to be loved unconditionally. In the glittering, big-hair era of the eighties, she looks to men to fill the void in her soul. But in the buttoned-down nineties, it is television news that captivates her. She will follow her own blind ambition to New York and around the globe, finding fame and success . . . and loneliness. Kate knows early on that her life will be nothing special. Throughout college, she pretends to be driven by a need for success, but all she really wants is to fall in love and have children and live an ordinary life. In her own quiet way, Kate is as driven as Tully. What she doesn't know is how being a wife and mother will change her . . . how she'll lose sight of who she once was, and what she once wanted. And how much she'll envy her famous best friend. . . . For thirty years, Tully and Kate buoy each other through life, weathering the storms of friendship---jealousy, anger, hurt, resentment. They think they've survived it all until a single act of betrayal tears them apart . . . and puts their courage and friendship to the ultimate test. Firefly Lane is for anyone who ever drank Boone's Farm apple wine while listening to Abba or Fleetwood Mac. More than a coming-of-age novel, it's the story of a generation of women who were both blessed and cursed by choices. It's about promises and secrets and betrayals. And ultimately, about the one person who really, truly knows you---and knows what has the power to hurt you . . . and heal you. Firefly Lane is a story you'll never forget . . . one you'll want to pass on to your best friend.

Your little ones will adore this delightful picture book, Daddy and Me, as you read this sweet rhyming story.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER LONGLISTED FOR THE 2021 BOOKER PRIZE NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES, THE GLOBE AND MAIL, THE GUARDIAN, ESQUIRE, VOGUE, TIME, THE WASHINGTON POST, THE TIMES (UK), VULTURE, THE ECONOMIST, NPR, AND BOOKRIOT ON PRESIDENT OBAMA’S SUMMER 2021 READING LIST The magnificent new novel from Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro--author of Never Let Me Go and the Booker Prize-winning The Remains of the Day. “The Sun always has ways to reach us.” From her place in the store, Klara, an Artificial Friend with outstanding observational qualities, watches carefully the behaviour of those who come in to browse, and of those who pass in the street outside. She remains hopeful a customer will soon choose her, but when the possibility emerges that her circumstances may change forever, Klara is warned not to invest too much in the promises of humans. In Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro looks at our rapidly changing modern world through the eyes of an unforgettable narrator to explore a fundamental question: what does it mean to love?

A work of fierce originality and brilliance, Miriam Toews' novel explores the ties that bind families together and the forces that tear them apart. It is the world according to Nomi Nickel, a heartbreakingly bewildered and wry young woman trapped in a small Mennonite town that seeks to set her on the path to righteousness and smother her at the same time.'Half of our family, the better-looking half, is missing,' Nomi tells us at the beginning of A Complicated Kindness. Left alone with her father Ray, her days are spent piecing together the reasons her mother Trudie and her sister Tash have gone missing, and trying to figure out what she can do to avoid a career at Happy Family Farms, a chicken abattoir on the outskirts of East Village - not the neighbourhood in Manhattan where Nomi most wants to live but the small town in southern Manitoba. East Village is ministered by Hans, Nomi's pious uncle, otherwise known as The Mouth.As Nomi gets to the bottom of the truth behind her mother's and sister's disappearances, she finds herself on a direct collision course with her uncle and the only community she has ever known. In this funny, compassionate and moving novel, Miriam Toews has created a character who will stay in the hearts of readers long after they've put the book down.