This is one of the most hopeful books I have read about the state of modern work. In Shorter, Alex Soojung-Kim Pang shares not only the stories of the creatives and visionaries around the world who are pushing back against always-on burnout culture, but he gives a practical, step-by-step guide for how they did it, why it matters-for all of us-and how others can follow their lead. A must-read for anyone who cares about the now or the future of work

It's time to question everything we think we know about work, starting with how long we need to do it. Shorter makes a strong case for working less, showing us how any business can profit from giving their workers more free time. Pang provides a step-by-step guide for leaders who are ready to liberate their people from the tyranny of the 40-hour work week

Who said a full workweek has to be five days? What if less is actually more? In Shorter, Alex Soojung-Kim Pang inspires us with a powerful vision: A shorter, but more productive and enjoyable workweek. I hope this book sparks a revolution in how-and how much-we work!

In Shorter, Soojung-Kim Pang, the author of Rest, looks at companies who have done just that - got their entire workforce to cut their working weeks. The result was an increase in productivity and often, profit. The practical study looks at what works and what doesn't. Do you want to hear the best news? Most companies that reduce their hours tend to cut meetings right back. If that isn't an incentive to read this book, I don't know what is.

The way we work is changing at an incredible pace. This invaluable book offers a clear way forward: we don't need to burn ourselves out, we can work less and get more done, and we can all, wherever we are in our careers, get our lives back.

A must read for anyone interested in the 4 day week. Not only does the book provide detailed accounts of how the 4-day-week was implemented across a wide range of companies across sectors and across countries, the book also provides answers to any doubts you may have about whether implementing a 4 day week is realistic. The answer is yes.

Read this book, stop with the long hours and get a life!

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.