Down in the basement of a bombed building in a heavily shelled area of Darayya there is a secret library. Around it, shattered buildings that were once homes and offices lie in treacherous ruins. No signs mark the presence of the library. Locals fear that Syrian government planes will bomb it if they find where it is. In a war zone, books are dangerous. While the streets above echo with rifle fire and shelling, below is a haven of peace and tranquillity....

Janine di Giovanni, an award-winning reporter renowned for her storytelling, who has covered nearly every violent conflict for the last 20 years, now turns her eyes to Syria. In this book she tells the real stories of that terrible conflict through the experiences of the ordinary people as the war begins to gain momentum. Written with a great sense of humality, it powerfully and movingly describes what ordinary life is like for people during wartime...

We stand on the threshold of the age of the algorithm, a not-too-distant future where machines will make some of our most important decisions - in healthcare, transport, finance, security, what we watch, where we go and even who we send to prison. So how much should we rely on them? What kind of future do we want? Hannah Fry takes us on a tour of the good, the bad and the downright ugly of the algorithms that surround us.

'Splash!' weaves a 10,000-year-old tale that begins in a bone-dry cave in the remote southwest corner of Egypt, winds its way through ancient Greece and Rome, flows mostly underground through the Dark and Middle Ages, and then re-emerges in the wake of the Renaissance before ending on the runway of the Tokyo Olympics. But swimming is also about more than feats of aquatic endurance or the terror of the bottomless deep. Its history offers a multi-tiered...