Beautifully written and brilliantly argued, Possessed is one of the few things you really need to own.

Bruce Hood convincingly shows that we are possessed with possessions, but his book is one possession you have to have, especially now. Engagingly written, Possessed brings psychological science to bear on understanding how to exorcise this demon.

Science writing at its best: it's funny, smart, and on an fascinating topic.

Ownership is a surprisingly nuanced and wonderfully colorful topic, and no one is better poised to tell its story than psychologist and author Bruce Hood. The book he's written is a page-turner that puts our intuitions under the spotlight at every turn.

Bruce Hood's excellent new book upends the concept of possession and ownership . . . Possessed combines philosophy with rigorous experimental research to examine the reasons why we want to own so much more than we need. Hood's writing is crisp and he covers an impressive range for such a slim volume. For practical strategies to declutter, read Marie Kondo. For those interested in the psychology and philosophy of materialism, this rich and engaging book will spark hours of joy.

Phenomenal ... The only theory I am aware of that attempts to explain broad patterns of human psychology on a global scale.

This anthropology-meets-big-data approach is not merely innovative, but underpins a fascinating and creative book, brimming with provocative ideas.

There's nothing so fascinating as a social anthropologist's analysis of his own tribe. Henrich shows how strange and exceptional Western society is when compared with most of the world

Henrich has thought more deeply about cultural evolution than anybody alive. His fascinating insights into just how weird people like he and I are, with our western lifestyles, and what the implications of that are for better and for worse, are a great contribution to scholarship.

Propelled by a bold vision, this landmark study is required reading for anyone curious about the origins of modernity

Henrich and his colleagues are shaking the foundations of psychology and economics - and hoping to change the way social scientists think about human behaviour and culture.

[A] sweeping and magisterial book, likely to become as foundational to cultural psychology as the WEIRD acronym [Henrich] and his colleagues coined a decade ago.

Joseph Henrich's The WEIRDest People in the World . . . makes for stunning reading. (It is also written with such wit and humor, and luminous clarity.) Probably an understatement to say that it is one of the most important books of the year.

One of the most interesting books I've read this year.

A brilliant performance - accessible, playful and scholarly, turning conventional history on its head and approaching it in a new way.

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.