Modern Romance - Aziz Ansari

In the old days, most people would find a decent person who lived in their village or neighbourhood, and after deciding they weren't a murderer, get married and have kids - all by the age of 22.

Now we spend years of our lives searching for our perfect soul mate and, thanks to dating apps, mobile phones and social media, we have more romantic options than ever before in human history. Yet we also have to confront strange new dilemmas, such as what to think when someone is too busy to reply to a text but has time to post a photo of their breakfast on Instagram. And if we have so many more options, why aren't people any less frustrated?

For years, American comedian Aziz Ansari has been aiming his comic insight at dating and relationships, and in Modern Romance, he teams up with award-winning sociologist Eric Klinenberg to investigate love in the age of technology. They enlisted some of the world's leading social scientists, conducted hundreds of interviews, analyzed the behavioural data, and researched dating cultures from Tokyo to Buenos Aires to New York City. The result is an unforgettable picture of modern love, combining Ansari's irreverent humour with cutting-edge social science.

F*** You Very Much: The surprising truth about why people are so rude - Danny Wallace

Did you know that even one rude comment in a life-and-death situation can decrease a surgeon's performance by as much as 50 percent? That we say we don't want rude politicians, but we vote for them anyway? Or that rude language can sway a jury in a criminal case?

Best-selling writer and broadcaster Danny Wallace (Yes Man, Awkward Situations for Men) is on a mission to understand where we have gone wrong. He travels the world interviewing neuroscientists, psychologists, NASA scientists, barristers, bin men, and bellboys. He joins a Radical Honesty group in Germany, talks to drivers about road rage in LA, and confronts his own online troll in a pub.

And in doing so, he uncovers the latest thinking about how we behave; how rudeness, once unleashed, can spread like a virus; and how even one flippant remark can snowball into disaster.

As insightful and enthralling as it is highly entertaining, F*** You Very Much is an eye-opening exploration into the worst side of human behaviour.

This book was originally published under the title I Can't Believe You Just Said That. But we decided it just wasn't rude enough....

Lincoln: A Novel - Gore Vidal

Lincoln is the cornerstone of Gore Vidal's fictional American chronicle, which includes Burr; 1876; Washington, D.C.; Empire; and Hollywood. It opens early on a frozen winter morning in 1861, when President-elect Abraham Lincoln slips into Washington, flanked by two bodyguards. The future president is in disguise, for there is talk of a plot to murder him. During the next four years there will be numerous plots to murder this man who has sworn to unite a disintegrating nation. 

Isolated in a ramshackle White House in the center of a proslavery city, Lincoln presides over a fragmenting government as Lee's armies beat at the gates. In this profoundly moving novel, a work of epic proportions and intense human sympathy, Lincoln is observed by his loved ones and his rivals. The cast of characters is almost Dickensian: politicians, generals, White House aides, newspapermen, Northern and Southern conspirators, amiably evil bankers, and a wife slowly going mad. 

Vidal's portrait of the president is at once intimate and monumental, stark and complex, drawn with the wit, grace, and authority of one of the great historical novelists.

An Anonymous Girl - Greer Hendriks, Sarah Pekkanen

When Jessica signs up for a psychology study conducted by the mysterious Dr Shields, she thinks all she’ll have to do is answer a few questions, collect her money and leave. But as the questions grow more and more invasive, she begins to feel as though they know what she’s thinking . . . and what she’s hiding.

As Jessica's paranoia grows, it becomes clear that she can no longer trust what is real in her life, and what is one of Dr Shields’s manipulative experiments. Caught in a web of deceit and jealousy, Jess quickly learns that some obsessions can be deadly.