Hannah Fry is quickly becoming the David Attenborough of maths.

A smart, witty, original take on the festive season, with calculations and theories to help you prepare and solve your Christmas conundrums.

Just in case the charm and beauty of mathematical thinking has passed by some of your friends and family, they will be grateful for this slim volume in their stocking. The puzzles and games of Hannah Fry and Thomas Evans involving present-wrapping and Queen's Speech bingo are but an entry drug for heady passages about the natureof truth and game theory.

From the perfect Secret Santa gift to finally proving the existence of St Nick, a new book uses mathematics to crack the toughest festival conundrums.

The broadcaster and author of The Mathematics of Love teams up with a mathematician and writer for this intelligent stocking filler ... sounds enormous fun.

A book of big questions, and big answers

Monumental and monumentally good

Diamond's sideways-on view of human development may well establish its author as one of the very few scientists to have changed the way we think about history

One of the best books I've reviewed this year.

Profound, charismatic and serious... One of the most important thinkers to emerge on the world stage for many years

The most sought-after psychologist in the world

A wonderful psychologist

Like the best intellectual polymaths, Peterson invites his readers to embark on their own intellectual, spiritual and ideological journeys... You have nothing to lose but your own misery

The most important and influential Canadian thinker since Marshall McLuhan. His bold synthesis of psychology, anthropology, science, politics and comparative religion is forming a genuinely humanistic university of the future

Someone with not only humanity and humour, but serious depth and substance ... Peterson has a truly cosmopolitan and omnivorous intellect... There is a burning sincerity to the man

A rock-star academic, a cool, cowboy-boot-wearing public thinker who directs tough love at overprotected youth ... Peterson twirls ideas around like a magician

Jordan Peterson is a Canadian psychologist whose seemingly overnight ascent to cultural rockstar comes after years of deep scholarship in many disciplines

12 Rules for Life hits home - from identifying the deeply engrained hierarchical ladder that motivates our decision making to asking indispensable and sometimes politically unpopular questions about your life and suggesting ways to better it

Peterson has become a kind of secular prophet who, in an era of lobotomised conformism, thinks out of the box ... His message is overwhelmingly vital

Beautiful, smart, and sometimes shocking

Yong delves into our deepest, darkest nooks and crannies to shed new light on what it is to be human.

Compelling

Ed Yong has written a riveting account of the microbes that make the world work. I Contain Multitudes will change the way you look at yourself --- and just about everything else.

Offer[s] engrossing—and gross—details about how an invisible world shapes our species…Mr. Yong’s book lives up to its title, containing multitudes of facts presented in graceful, accessible prose….The author wonderfully turns to the humanities again and again to enrich the book’s scientific detail…And he’s funny.

I Contain Multitudes changes you the way all great science writing does. You become disoriented, looking at the world around you in a new way. With vivid tales and graceful explanations, Ed Yong reveals how the living things we see around us are wildly complex collectives.

Yong has captured the essence of this exciting field, expressing the enthusiasm and wonder that the scientific community feels when working with the microbiome. It is rare that a writer has the capacity to speak to the public and the scientific world with equanimity; Yong has succeeded in delivering a compelling and informative exploration of a vast research field and a fundamental work that can stand as textbook and a rip-roaring read!

With a simply wonderful book, Ed Yong opens the doorway to a hidden world around and inside us. He's smart, he's witty, and he's at the cutting edge. You could not get a better guide.

Ed Yong is one of our finest young explainers of science—wicked smart, broadly informed, sly, savvy, so illuminating. And this is an encyclopedia of fascinations—a teeming intellectual ecosystem, a keen book on the intricacies of the microbiome and more.

This compelling and beautifully written book will change the way people look at the world around, and within, them. It provides an insight into the latest research in the field, and into the people doing the work, that is unmatched by any other book on the microbiome to date. Certainly among the best books in an increasingly crowded field and written with a true passion for and understanding of the microbiome.

A whistle-stop tour of the microbial world for the non-expert… Yong has won numerous awards for his science writing…it doesn’t take long to realise why.

A marvellous book! Ed Yong’s brilliant gift for storytelling and precise writing about science converge in I Contain Multitudes to make the invisible and tiny both visible and mighty. A unique, entertaining, and smart read.

[A] magnificent revaluation of bacteriology.

This is a book of wonder.

A state-of-the art look at what we know about microbes… Yong makes difficult concepts and scientific terms easy to understand – and his excitement at the variety and wonder of nature makes him an enthusiastic and engaging writer’

The complex relationships between microbes and their environments are explored with rigour and humour.

A deep and sensible dive in to this complex and fascinating dimension of biology.

[It] is superbly judged. It brilliantly synthesises the surprising and recently-revealed inter-dependencies of visible and invisible organisms… Look out for it on numerous book prize shortlists in 2017.

Yong will make you think about yourself – and the world around you – in a different way.

It is a fascinating account of the unseen creatures that live within and all around us. Yong takes us on this journey through the microscope to discover the most recent research from scientists all round the world and tell us of the secrets that are being discovered about microbes… Yong writes with an engaging and eloquent style and makes the science in here really accessible. Well worth reading.

Yong’s enthusiasm for bacteria is infectious, as he describes the beauty of luminescent bacteria in the Hawaiian bobtail squid and the benefits of our microscopic neighbours.

A master class in popular scientific education.

Yong made me think “wow” over and over again. He tells us that there is a universe of tiny things. We should think about them.

Enlightenment Now seeks to undo, with facts and figures, the pessimism that has paralysed the world ... We must read this book and absorb its message

Guys, it's really not that bad. In fact, it's the best it's ever been ... Pinker urges people to look at the bigger picture and dive into the data

Things are not as bad as your Facebook news feed makes them seem ... a cheerful, contrarian tract for dark times

Compelling ... At a moment when liberal Enlightenment values are under attack, from the right and the left, this is a very important contribution ... An impressive and useful accomplishment