Fascinating and irresistibly page-turning, The Neuroscientist Who Lost Her Mind is an Oliver Sacks-meets-When Breath Becomes Air account of insanity caused by over a dozen brain tumors. Barbara Lipska's remarkable story illuminates the many mysteries of our fragile yet resilient brains and through her harrowing journey of recovery, she shows us that nothing is impossible.

In this fascinating book, a neuroscientist describes the terrifying symptoms she suffered as a result of multiple brain tumours. We learn about how the brain can produce bizarre and bewildering symptoms from the point of view of someone who has personal experience of aspects of the mental illness that she spends her life studying... Completely compelling and powerful, and hard to put down.

A spellbinding investigation into the mysteries of the human brain, led by a scientist whose tenacity is as remarkable as her story.

A superb memoir from a highly respected neuroscientist ... [a] remarkable account of sanity lost and regained.

A riveting science story about how brains go bad, interwoven with the remarkable personal story of one brain going spectacularly bad. A total nail-biter.

An extraordinary chronicle. Barbara Lipska's story is inspiring and painful, but most of all it is a tribute to the human spirit told with the insight of a scientist and the love of a truly compassionate soul. I was hooked from the first page and could not put this down until the final sentence.

Admirably clear and totally readable

This book will help you sleep at night... The authors spin some winning tales. Who'd turn down being treated with a smart surgical knife?

A remarkable book that puts us self-important humans in our proper place in the cosmos, yet also explains why the story of human culture and knowledge - what Christian calls collective learning - matters for understanding our present world and shaping its future

A new book by Mark Cocker is a major event, and [Our Place] is no exception… Cocker has always been brilliant at considering our relationship with nature… You can come away from it feeling that something can be done, that we can save Britain’s wildlife, if only there is the will to turn well-meaning generalities into action. The clock is ticking.

A superb new book by the naturalist Mark Cocker that is fast becoming highly influential… The environment secretary is telling friends he found it ‘powerfully persuasive’.

I kept thinking of the raw power of Mark Cocker’s astonishing Our Place, which was brilliant because it was so particular and familiar in the natural world it anatomised.

An artful mix of lyrical writing and assured analysis that amounts to a quiet manifesto for action.

More urgent than any of Cocker’s previous writing… This resourceful and eloquent book could prove to be important.

This is the best book on the state of nature since George Monbiot’s Feral and deserves to be read just as widely… a very good read.

Devastatingly perceptive.

This book contains some exquisite writing about nature, but it is always powerfully and insistently ground in “its cause” … A radical polemic in the tradition of Hazlitt and Cobbett

This is a clarion call to the country’

A new book by Mark Cocker is a major event and his latest is a work of sweeping ambition

Important… ambitious… [Cocker] is a superb writer

A compelling history of nature conservation and why it matters, it is worth your time

Our Place… is a work of serious and sustained advocacy – passionate and committed… elements are fused in the writing, along with many apparent digressions and asides, in a way that gives the book a richly textured feel… the argument advances on several fronts simultaneously and in more than one dimension, in a complex literary ecology matching his subject.

Mark Cocker… writes with superb understanding

A lyrical and intensely personal account… an excellent and important book… a wake-up call to us all.

Its breadth is startling... It changes the way you look at the world and few books tick that box.

Probably the most ambitious history book of the year. Certainly the most thought-provoking

As a writer, Harari is superbly clear. He’s also a formidable polymath and a wonderfully elegant thinker... He is a brilliant analyst with a storyteller’s gift

I have just read Yuval Noah Harari's book Sapiens. It is brilliant. Most likely the best - and I have read very many - on the history of humankind. I have never read anything better

We usually think that we are an outcome of our personal history, where we grew up, the way our parents educated us, etc. In Sapiens, Harari delves deep into our history as a species to help us understand who we are and what made us this way. An engrossing read.

Eloquent and wonderfully funny

This is mega-history of the best sort: sweeping but not simplistic, contemporary but not gimmicky, provocative but not contrarian. Almost everyone will want to argue with one part of this book or another, but working out which part and why will do us all good.

For its sheer originality and intellectual stimulation, I was captivated by Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens

That fellow connected an awful lot of dots in that work. I thought the book would be a dense read, a slog, with a struggle for my brain on every page. I had a highlighter ready to mark the more pavement-thick paragraphs I’d have to go back and re-ponder. Instead, I flew through it like it was a nonfiction The Thorn Birds. Does that mean I’m getting smarter?

Ambitious and invigorating

Harari’s book is important reading for serious-minded, self-reflective sapiens

Brilliantly done and endlessly fascinating

Vast and intricate... Engaging and informative

A thrilling account of humankind’s extraordinary history

The book is maddeningly opinionated and insanely ambitious. It is also compulsively readable and impossibly learned. It is one of the best accounts by a Homo sapiens of the unlikely story of our violent, accomplished species

An enthusiastic and confident narrative that is relentlessly interesting from the first word to the last

The most exciting book I’ve read this year

One of the most talked about non-fiction bestsellers of the year... Harari is one of the very few thinkers around who’s really looking at what’s happening now. Sapiens is his attempt to tell the story of the past to understand the present: the great technological advances that we are all living through now

Eloquent and provocative

A headclutchingly provocative account of our species from the Stone Age to the present... Stunningly ambitious and compellingly written. They call it macro-history. They’re right.

Fascinating

Unforgettably vivid language. I urge everyone to read it

Contains a remarkable piece of information on almost every page and reminds us that we should be grateful to be human.

Thought-provoking

I would recommend Sapiens to anyone who’s interested in the history and future of our species.

Read with an open mind and you might look at life in a whole new way.

A fantastic book about how homo sapiens came to conquer the world

A dark and thrilling epic.

I have continued to be driven bonkers by my current obsession: Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari, an extraordinary tome that charts the plight of the planet’s most destructive species since the dawn of time: us. Every paragraph gives you pause for thought, as it catalogues how nuts human beings really are… It may be the best book I’ve ever read; it’s certainly fascinating.

This doesn’t make you feel clever; it makes you feel included. It’s written so brilliantly… He’s written about the human family as a family.

It's one of the best books I’ve read recently and gives an excellent overview of how our species has developed and helps us understand why and who we are today.

A sweeping account of the history of our species, written in vivid prose.

It rattles along, firing glitter-coated bullets of wisdom as it goes. If Carlsberg made professors, they’d have fashioned them thus. You’ll never have quite as much fun while learning so much.

Reading this wonderful book feels like looking at life down the bigger end of the telescope. Its scope – which incorporates the history of our species and the question of what the future may have in store – is so magisterial, one has an increasingly godlike feeling while reading it.

An absolute trove that everyone who wants to understand everything from human evolution to diet, religions and limited liability companies should read.

Opening up a controversial topic with spirit and thoroughness, Sapiens will challenge your preconceptions, provoke discussion and, most importantly, push you to think for yourself… Bold and provocative.

A brilliant, interdisciplinary account of the past and future of our species… Some of Harari’s most interesting points are the ways in which the fundamental, unchanging traits that make us human (emotions, desires) relate to the modern world. Essential reading for any liberal arts degree.

In the unlikely event you haven’t already read it and…fancy learning some cool new stuff in a fun way, I wholeheartedly recommend it to you.

It’s so intense that you have to read a bit then have a rest. It has brilliant passages, such as where he argues humans became enslaved by agriculture. Vivid and invigorating.

Every now and then a book comes along that tilts your perspective on the world. This internationally best-selling phenomenon is one of them.