Steve Martin’s and Joe Marks’ Messengers is engaging, informative and entertaining. It will change the way you think about who you follow and take advice from. But why would you listen to me? Read their book to find out.

A tour de force. Timely and thoroughly researched.

A powerful, profoundly illuminating exploration of one of the most important subjects of our time. Martin and Marks have a terrific talent for combining evidence and research with lively and vivid writing. Trust these messengers!

A timely book

A crucial reminder that the messenger is as important as the message

Supported by numerous studies and examples, this zeitgesty book shows how our innate deference to factors such as beauty and status over and evidence and expertise make it "scarcely surprising that we live in a world awash with fake news.

Fascinating

An easy-to-read part-memoir, part-explanation of why humans are the way they are and what we can learn from it

These stories are beautifully told, and they are comforting at first... Moran's compassion shines through this gift of a book

A ­calming antidote to the world of ­professionally failing... What Moran has created is a slim, lyrical and blessedly cool-headed reflection on failure as a universally shared human trial... What he provides, instead of the mechanical business strategies laid out in some popular failure titles, is a selection of fascinating and often moving lives, characterised in some way by their failure

A beautifully written meditation on life's inevitable setbacks and what he sardonically terms "the failing well movement". Moran encourages us to accept our impostor syndromes, to avoid becoming a "sporting masochist" for whom winning is everything, and to admire the history of West End musicals that were instant, notorious flops

A classic anti (or counter-intuitive) self-help treatise -- robustly argued, intellectually sturdy, laced with self-deprecatory humour... it is deeply empathetic to the trials of the creative life

I have valued Samantha Harvey's company through her memoir of insomnia, The Shapeless Unease. Harvey's description of not sleeping as a kind of assault feels utterly true.

A small miracle of a book. Reading it feels like its own kind of lucid dream … You would imagine a book written in such circumstances would have a hazy quality, but in fact its clarity of expression is startling. It's a fireworks display. It's also a profound meditation on language and loss and time, and on how we construct ourselves through stories. And it's painful. And it's beautiful. And I love it. Samantha Harvey is the most exceptionally gifted of authors, and here she demonstrates that she can literally do anything.

I am still shuddering, almost, from the beautiful, beautiful writing and its broken, angry, vibrant demand – a dare almost – to accept life, and brave it, with all it brings.

A creative account of a life with little sleep… Readers looking for their own cure will instead find an erudite companion to help them through the dark times.

It's funny, sad, wry, always worrying away at the mystery of sleep and its absence and finding endless new angles so that the whole has something of the quality of those waking dreams that haunt the insomniac and are her private country.

A slim, intense memoir about her own year-long experience of nocturnal unrest… a torture Harvey describes with a combination of desperation, wry humour and — despite the scarcity she is subjected to — a deeply felt sense of life’s abundance… [her] prose…glows off the page: an exacting inquisition of the self leading to imperfect peace.

[Harvey is] brilliant on words and the nature of writing.

[With The Shapeless Unease] Harvey has certainly proved that insomnia, as much as any of the more obviously nasty diseases, might be as worthy a subject of literature as love, battle or jealousy…her book rises to that level.

[A] bravely exposing deep dive into the emotional murk of her [Havey’s] restless mind….[it] reveals…the irresistible writerly impulse to pin experience to the page.

[The Shapeless Unease] reads like a dream sequence… Even reading this made me feel dizzy… [Harvey is] a vigorous, eloquent writer… she conveys the way sleeplessness takes you into the death zone of life.

Mesmerising…at times, bitingly funny… [The Shapeless Unease is] an engrossing portrait of the fragility of identity and coherency in the grip of insomnia. I hadn’t read Harvey before this, but her facility with language here captivated me and I’ll be seeking out her novels next.

Urgent and full of arresting images and insights.

[The Shapeless Unease] is littered with sharp insights expressed in exquisitely lucid prose but is as amorphous as its title suggests.

It’s a claustrophobic, enlightening, moving, existential treatise on sleep, insomnia and death. And it’s funny, too.

I wish I had saved The Shapeless Unease to read in isolation but Samantha Harvey’s book about insomnia, time, death and so many unknowable things is a blessing to have in lonely times. It is a profound and stunning book but funny, too.

A beautiful, jagged little book about insomnia and so many unknowable things: life and death, Buddhism, and how language alters our thinking. But I was most struck by its form and structure.

[Samantha Harvey's] cerebral, startlingly clear account of somehow pulling through [from insomnia] carries an electric charge and meditates on not only the mystery of sleep but also writing, swimming and dreams.

[The Shapeless Unease] is beautifully crafted and its achievement makes itself more apparent on a second reading.

A masterpiece, so good I can hardly breathe. I'm completely floored by it.

This book seems appropriately messy-haired and wild-eyed... Anyone who has lain awake the night before a big test will recognize such manic flourishes. Harvey captures the 4 a.m. bloom of magical thinking; stories proliferate within stories... To read Harvey is to grow spoiled on gorgeous phrases.