2025

Reeling from the pain of devastating miscarriages and suffering from PTSD after military adventures in Afghanistan, Merlin and his wife Lizzie decide to leave the bustle of London and return to Merlin’s childhood home, a Cornish hill farm called Cabilla in the heart of Bodmin Moor.

There, they are met by unexpected challenges: a farm slipping ever further into debt, the discovery that the overgrazed and damaged woods running throughout the valley are in fact one of the UK’s last remaining fragments of Atlantic temperate rainforest, and the sudden and near catastrophic strickening by Covid of Merlin’s father, the explorer Robin. As they fall more in love with the rainforest that Merlin had adventured in as a child, so begins a fight to save not only themselves and their farm, but also one of the world’s most endangered habitats.

Our Oaken Bones is an honest and intimate true story about renewal, the astonishing healing power of nature, and our duty to heal it in return.

Ancient Rome is more popular than ever.  But there’s one important, hidden side of the story that’s not being told: that of the women of Imperial Rome.

The wives, mothers, sisters and daughters of the five first Roman emperors, from Augustus to Nero, have had an almost universally bad press, portrayed as murderers and nymphomaniacs. But these images say as much about the misogyny of Roman society – amplified by modern authors such as Robert Graves in his best-selling but wildly inaccurate novel, I Claudius.

Writer and campaigner Joan Smith tells a different story. Drawing upon years of campaigning against domestic and sexual violence, she identifies familiar strands of abusive behaviour against women, showing how the history of the Julio-Claudian dynasty represents a century of femicide. The women described in this book might have been the most privileged women of their age, but they suffered everything from child marriage, marital rape and separation from children to exile and murder.  Their reputations were shaped by the Emperors and their chroniclers – Tiberius’ mother Livia as the wicked stepmother, Augustus’s daughter Julia as the ‘nymphomaniac’, her grand-daughter Agrippina as the power-hungry mother of Nero.  After their deaths, some even became non-persons, with statues and images destroyed.

Joan Smith revisits the original Roman texts to tell a new story – of spirited, inspiring and sometimes reckless resistance to male authority.

The history of autism is male. It is time for women and girls to enter the spotlight. When autistic girls meet clinicians, they are often misdiagnosed with anxiety, depression, personality disorders, or are missed altogether.

Autism’s ‘male spotlight’ means we are only now starting to redress this profound injustice. In The Lost Girls of Autism, renowned brain scientist Gina Rippon delves into the emerging science of female autism, asking why it has been systematically ignored for so long. Generations of researchers, convinced autism was a male problem, simply didn’t bother looking for it in women.

But it is now becoming increasingly clear that many autistic women and girls do not fit the traditional, male, model of autism. Instead, they camouflage and mask, hiding their autistic traits to accommodate a society that shuns them. Urgent and insightful, this is a searching examination of how sexism has biased our understanding of autism.

Informed by the latest research in psychology and neuroscience, The Lost Girls of Autism is a clarion call for society to recognize the full spectrum of autistic experience.