We probably went to school for what felt like a very long time. We probably took care with our homework. Along the way we surely learned intriguing things about equations, the erosion of glaciers, the history of the Middle Ages, and the tenses of foreign languages. But why, despite all the lessons we sat through, were we never taught the really important things that dominate and trouble our lives: who to start a relationship with, how to trust people, how to understand one’s psyche, how to move on from sorrow or betrayal, and how to cope with anxiety and shame?

Bringing up a child to be an authentic and mentally robust adult is one of life’s great challenges. It is also, fortunately, not a matter of luck. The Good Enough Parent is a compendium of life lessons, including how to say ‘no’ to a child you adore, how to look beneath the surface of ‘bad’ behavior to work out what might really be going on, how to encourage a child to be genuinely kind, and how to handle the moods and gloom of adolescence. 

We know that our minds are capable of great things because, every now and then, they come out with a brilliant idea or two. However, our minds are also unpredictable, spending large stretches of time idling or distracting themselves. This is a book about how to optimize these beautiful yet fitful instruments so that they can more regularly and generously produce the sort of insights and ideas we need to fulfill our potential and achieve the contentment we deserve.

Love has a history and we ride - sometimes rather helplessly - on its currents. Since around 1750, we have been living in a highly distinctive era in the history of love that we can call Romanticism. And it has been a disaster for love. Relationships challenges the assumptions of the Romantic view of love. It shows how to develop new attitudes that can lead to a psychologically mature vision of love.

The modern world can be a complicated, frenzied, and noisy place, filled with too many options, products, ideas and opinions. That explains why what many of us long for is simplicity: a life that can be more pared down, peaceful, and focused on the essentials. But finding simplicity is not always easy; it isn’t just a case of emptying out our closets or trimming back commitments in our diaries. True simplicity requires that we understand the roots of our distractions – and develop a canny respect for the stubborn reasons why things can grow complex and overwhelming.

When trying to deal with our current troubles and anxieties, it can be deeply irritating to be asked to consider our childhoods. They happened so long ago; we can probably barely remember, let alone relate to, the little person we once were. But one of the most powerful explanations for why we may, as adults, be struggling, is that we were denied the opportunity to fully be ourselves in our earliest years. This book is a guide to better understanding our younger selves in order to shape who we wish to be in the future.

This is a guide to anxiety: why we feel it, how we experience it when it strikes, and what we can do when we come under its influence. Across a series of essays that look at the subject from a number of angles, the tone is helpful, compassionate, and in the best sense, practical. 

Few life skills are as neglected, yet as important, as the ability to remain calm. Our very worst decisions and interactions are almost invariably the result of a loss of calm - and a descent into anxiety and agitation. Surprisingly, but very fortunately, our power to remain calm can be rehearsed and improved. We don’t have to stay where we are now: our responses to everyday challenges can dramatically alter. This is a book that patiently unpacks the causes of our greatest stresses and gives us a succession of arguments with which to defend ourselves against panic and fury.

We don't think too much about sex; we're merely thinking about it in the wrong way.

So asserts Alain de Botton in this rigorous and supremely honest book designed to help us navigate the intimate and exciting - yet often confusing and difficult - experience that is sex. Few of us tend to feel we're entirely normal when it comes to sex, and what we’re supposed to be feeling rarely matches up with the reality. This audiobook argues that 21st-century sex is ultimately fated to be a balancing act between love and desire, and adventure and commitment.

Break free of your destructive relationship with money, and learn how money can make you happy. Our relationship with money is one that lasts a lifetime. It can be as important as family life, as competitive as work, and as exciting and secretive as love. Yet books about money tend to take one of two routes: a) how to get more, or b) how to deal with less. This book turns these questions upside down, and looks not at money itself, but at the way we view it. How does money drive us? How does it frighten us?

Coexisting but conflicting needs create self-sabotaging behaviors. This is why we resist efforts to change, often until they feel completely futile. But by extracting crucial insight from our most damaging habits, building emotional intelligence by better understanding our brains and bodies, releasing past experiences at a cellular level, and learning to act as our highest potential future selves, we can step out of our own way and into our potential. 

We all know the headiness and excitement of the early days of love. But what comes after? In Edinburgh a couple, Rabih and Kirsten, fall in love. They get married, they have children—but no long-term relationship is as simple as "happily ever after". The Course of Love is a novel that explores what happens after the birth of love, what it takes to maintain love, and what happens to our original ideals under the pressures of an average existence.

For anyone who ever wondered what Marcel Proust had in mind when he wrote the one-and-a-quarter-million words of In Search of Lost Time (while bedridden no less), Alain de Botton has the answer. For, in this stylish, erudite and frequently hilarious book, de Botton dips deeply into Proust’s life and work - his fiction, letter, and conversations – and distils from them that rare self-help manual: one that is actually helpful.

Alain de Botton has performed a stunning feat: He has transformed arcane philosophy into something accessible and entertaining, useful and kind. Drawing on the work of six of the world's most brilliant thinkers, de Botton has arranged a panoply of wisdom to guide us through our most common problems.

The boring debate between fundamentalist believers and non-believers is finally moved on by Alain de Botton's inspiring new book, which boldly argues that the supernatural claims of religion are of course entirely false - and yet that religions still have important things to teach the secular world.