Les Enquêtes d’une médium

A superb autobiography by one of the great literary figures of the twentieth century, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter offers an intimate picture of growing up in a bourgeois French family, rebelling as an adolescent against the conventional expectations of her class, and striking out on her own with an intellectual and existential ambition exceedingly rare in a young woman in the 1920s. Simone de Beavoir describes her early life, from her birth in Paris in 1908 to her student days at the Sorbonne, where she met Jean-Paul sartre - 'the dream-companion I had longed for since I was fifteen'.

In the midst of the worst global health crisis in recent memory, those working in the NHS have been celebrated as heroes. But what does it mean to have to go to work in such challenging times?Newly qualified as an advanced clinical physician, thirty-two year old Louise Curtis was very much looking forward to going back to work in A&E in her Midlands hospital. What she did not expect was to be confronted with the most horrific frontline scenario a nurse could ever imagine. Moved into a newly created Intensive Care Unit for Covid patients, Louise was brought face to face with death and suffering on an unimaginable scale.A Nurse's Story is the nail-biting story of what she found there, how she tried to cope with it and the price she has had to pay for doing so. It is a heartbreaking and heartwarming account of what NHS staff are going through on a daily basis. It is a story of tears, bravery, self-sacrifice but also of hope and great kindness, of people pulling together and triumphing against daunting odds.

Long considered one of Simone de Beauvoir's masterpieces, A Very Easy Death is a profoundly affecting, day-by-day recounting of her mother's final days after she is hospitalized following a fall. Though a devout Catholic, her faith is subsumed by her terror of death, and as her body fails, she clings to life with fierce, primal desperation. In depicting her mother's refusal to 'go gentle' while her autonomy and dignity are taken from her, Simone de Beauvoir 'shows the power of compassion when it is allied with acute intelligence' (Sunday Telegraph). Powerful, touching and sometimes shocking, this is an end-of-life account that no reader is likely to forget.

Tara Westover grew up preparing for the End of Days, watching for the sun to darken, for the moon to drip as if with blood. She spent her summers bottling peaches and her winters rotating emergency supplies, hoping that when the World of Men failed, her family would continue on, unaffected.She hadn’t been registered for a birth certificate. She had no school records because she’d never set foot in a classroom, and no medical records because her father didn’t believe in doctors or hospitals. According to the state and federal government, she didn’t exist.As she grew older, her father became more radical, and her brother, more violent. At sixteen Tara decided to educate herself. Her struggle for knowledge would take her far from her Idaho mountains, over oceans and across continents, to Harvard and to Cambridge. Only then would she wonder if she’d travelled too far. If there was still a way home.EDUCATED is an account of the struggle for self-invention. It is a tale of fierce family loyalty, and of the grief that comes with the severing of the closest of ties. With the acute insight that distinguishes all great writers, from her singular experience Westover has crafted a universal coming-of-age story that gets to the heart of what an education is and what it offers: the perspective to see one's life through new eyes, and the will to change it.