Selected from the books Sapiens and Homo Deus by Yuval Noah HarariVINTAGE MINIS: GREAT MINDS.A series of short books by the world's greatest writers on the experiences that make us human Also in the Vintage Minis series:Home by Salman RushdieBabies by Anne EnrightEating by Nigella LawsonDrinking by John Cheever

Charles Strickland, a conventional stockbroker, abandons his wife and children for Paris and Tahiti, to live his life as a painter. Whilst his betrayal of family, duty and honour gives him the freedom to achieve greatness, his decision leads to an obsession which carries severe implications.

With passions hopelessly conceived, affections betrayed, marriages made and broken, this title includes stories in which the joys, fears, loves and awakenings of women echo throughout, laying bare the unexceptional and yet inescapable pain of human contact.

A family tale of mad passions and volcanic family hatreds, of titanic matriarchs and their mesmerised offspring, of premature deaths and curses that strike beyond the grave.

Factorising? Finding the locus? Solving for x? Probability distributions? What do these mean? This book gives you all the ammunition to help you to help your teenager get to grips with GCSE maths. It also includes practical and fun examples of where the maths crops up in the real world.

It is off-season in a remote Highland sea port: 21-year-old Morvern Callar, a low-paid employee in the local supermarket, wakes one morning to find her strange boyfriend has committed suicide and is dead on their kitchen floor. Morvern's laconic reaction is both intriguing and immoral. What she does next is even more appalling.

Whilst awaiting trial for war crimes in an Israeli prison, Howard W Campbell Jr sets down his memoirs on an old German typewriter. He has used such a typewriter before, when he worked as a Nazi propagandist under Goebbels. Though that was before he agreed to become a spy for US military. Is Howard guilty?

Welcome to motherhood - a land of aching fatigue, constant self-sacrifice and thankless servitude, a land of bottomless devotion, small hands and feet like warm pink roses, and velvet kisses. This book offers a collection of short stories dealing with motherhood such as: Dear George, Hey Yeah Right Get a Life and Constitutional.