As a therapist, Lori knows a lot about pain, about the ways in which pain is tied to loss, and how change and loss travel together. She knows how affirming it feels to blame the outside world for her frustrations, to deny ownership of whatever role she might have in the existential play called My Incredibly Important Life. When a devastating event takes place in Lori’s life, she realises that, before being able to help her patients, she must first learn how to help herself.

Maybe You Should Talk to Someone is the story of an incredible relationship � between Lori, a therapist at a critical life juncture, and her own therapist, Wendell, a veteran therapist with an unconventional style. Through their sessions, Wendell teaches Lori how to become a better person and a better therapist, as she goes about the business of helping her own patients � the couple who are struggling after having a baby, the narcissist TV producer, the older woman who feels she has nothing to live for, the self-destructive alcoholic young woman, the terminally ill 35-year-old newlywed.

Taking place over one year, beginning with the devastating event that lands her in Wendell’s office, this is a rare and candid insight into a profession conventionally bound with rules and secrecy, told with charm and compassion, vulnerability and humour.

How did the advent of refrigeration help create the golden age of Hollywood? How did the invention of flash photography help shift public opinion on the plight of New York's poorest inhabitants and bring about social reform? And what about our battle against dirt? How did that help create the microchips in our smartphones and computers?

In How We Got to Now, Steven Johnson traces six essential innovations that made the modern world; from their origins in ancient history to the technological advancements of recent years. A celebration of innovation: this book shows how time and time again, big ideas coalesce out of smaller, incremental breakthroughs. Unlocking tales of the unsung heroes and unexpected scientific revolutions, this is the story of the ideas that changed the world and the way we live in it.

'Johnson is one of the world's best chroniclers of innovation and in this book he brings a plethora of insights' Matt Ridley, Sunday Times

'Readable, entertaining, and a challenge to any jaded sensibility that has become inured to the everyday miracles all around us' Peter Forbes, Guardian

'Steven Johnson is the Darwin of technology. Through fascinating observations and insights, he enlightens us about the origin of ideas' Walter Isaacson, author of Steve Jobs

'Elegant, one of the most persuasive advocates for the role of collaboration in innovation . . . Johnson's erudition can be quite gobsmacking' Philip Delves Broughton, Wall Street Journal

Steven Johnson is the US bestselling author of Where Good Ideas Come From, The Invention of Air, The Ghost Map, and Everything Bad Is Good for You. He is the founder of a variety of influential websites - most recently, outside.in - and writes for Time, Wired, The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.

The challenges we face today are formidable, including inequality, climate change, Artificial Intelligence and nuclear weapons. But the way to deal with them is not to sink into despair or try to lurch back to a mythical idyllic past; it's to treat them as problems we can solve, as we have solved other problems in the past. In making the case for an Enlightenment newly recharged for the 21st century, Pinker shows how we can use our faculties of reason and sympathy to solve the problems that inevitably come with being products of evolution in an indifferent universe. We will never have a perfect world, but - defying the chorus of fatalism and reaction - we can continue to make it a better one.