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A FINANCIAL TIMES BOOK OF THE YEARA call to action for the creative class and labour movement to rally against the power of Big Tech and Big Media.Corporate concentration has breached the stratosphere, as have corporate profits. An ever-expanding constellation of industries are now monopolies (where sellers have excessive power over buyers) or monopsonies (where buyers hold the whip hand over sellers) - or both.Scholar Rebecca Giblin and writer and activist Cory Doctorow argue we're in a new era of 'chokepoint capitalism', with exploitative businesses creating insurmountable barriers to competition that enable them to capture value that should rightfully go to others. All workers are weakened by this, but the problem is especially well illustrated by the plight of creative workers. From Amazon's use of digital rights management and bundling to radically change the economics of book publishing, to Google and Facebook's siphoning away of ad revenues from news media, and the Big Three record labels' use of inordinately long contracts to up their own margins at the cost of artists, chokepoints are everywhere.By analysing book publishing and news, live music and music streaming, screenwriting, radio, and more, Giblin and Doctorow deftly show how powerful corporations construct 'anti-competitive flywheels' designed to lock in users and suppliers, make their markets hostile to new entrants, and then force workers and suppliers to accept unfairly low prices.Chokepoint Capitalism is a call to workers of all sectors to unite to help smash these chokepoints and take back the power and profit that's being heisted away - before it's too late.

The sequel to bestseller Tokyo Vice, now a major HBO drama, with a second season coming in 2024.It's been a while since Jake Adelstein was the only gaijin crime reporter for the Yomiuri Shimbun. The global economy is in shambles, Jake is off the police beat but still chain-smoking clove cigarettes, and Tadamasa Goto, the most powerful boss in the Japanese organised-crime world, has been banished from the yakuza, giving Adelstein one less enemy to worry about - for the time being.Adelstein has a new gig these days: due-diligence work, or using his investigative skills to dig up information on entities whose bosses would prefer that some things stay hidden. Underneath layers of paperwork, corporations are thinly veiled fronts for the yakuza. Pachinko parlors are a hidden battleground between disenfranchised Japanese Koreans and North Korean extortion plots. TEPCO, the electric power corporation keeping the lights on for all of Tokyo, scrambles to hide its willful oversights that ultimately led to the 2011 Fukushima meltdown. And the Japanese government shows levels of corruption that make gangsters look like philanthropists.In this riveting memoir, Jake Adelstein once again reveals Japan's dark underworld, as he battles to keep himself in the light.

THE INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERA fast-paced account of America's plunge into simultaneous cold wars against two very different adversaries - Xi Jinping's China and Valdimir Putin's Russia.New Cold Wars - the latest from Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and bestselling author of The Perfect Weapon David E. Sanger - tells the riveting story of America at a crossroads. At the turn of the millennium, the United States was confident that a democratic Russia and a newly wealthy China could gradually be pulled into the Western-led order. That proved a fantasy. By the time Washington emerged from the age of terrorism, the three nuclear powers were engaged in a high-stakes struggle for military, economic, and technological supremacy - with nations around the world forced to take sides.Interviewing a remarkable array of top officials in the United States, world leaders, and tech companies thrust onto the front lines, Sanger unfolds a riveting narrative spun around the era's critical questions. Will Putin's ill-considered invasion of Ukraine prove his undoing, and will he reach for his nuclear arsenal? Will China strike back at the US chip embargo, or seize Taiwan, the world's semiconductor capital?Taking readers from the battlefields of Ukraine - where trench warfare and cyberwarfare are fought side by side - to the back rooms and boardrooms where diplomats, spies, and tech executives jockey for geopolitical advantage, New Cold Wars is an astonishing first-draft history chronicling America's return to superpower conflict, the choices that lie ahead, and what is at stake for the United States and the world.

An Independent Climate Book of the Year 2023In this sweeping work of science and history, the renowned climate scientist and author of The New Climate War shows us the conditions on Earth that allowed humans not only to exist but thrive, and how they are imperiled if we veer off course.For the vast majority of its 4.54 billion years, Earth has proven it can manage just fine without human beings. Then came the first proto-humans, who emerged just a little more than 2 million years ago - a fleeting moment in geological time. What is it that made this benevolent moment of ours possible? Ironically, it's the very same thing that now threatens us - climate change.Climate variability has at times created new niches that humans or their ancestors could potentially exploit, and challenges that at times have spurred innovation. But the conditions that allowed humans to live on this earth are fragile, incredibly so. There's a relatively narrow envelope of climate variability within which human civilisation remains viable. And our survival depends on conditions remaining within that range. In this book, renowned climate scientist Michael Mann arms readers with the knowledge necessary to appreciate the gravity of the unfolding climate crisis, while emboldening them - and others - to act before it truly does become too late.

A radical vision for a better future: an economy that works for us, rather than the other way around.As this major German bestseller reports, our world is at a tipping point, and we feel it every day. Costs are rising, the gap between the rich and poor is increasing, natural resources are depleted, and the effects of climate change are starting to take hold. We are under increasing social and environmental stress. But, as leading economist Maja Göpel argues here, there is another path forward.She invites us to imagine what we want our future to look like, and offers solutions that will help us to get there. It's time to question our principles, set new goals, and re-evaluate our priorities. Time to rethink our world and find new ways of living that don't drain our planet any further. We need a fair distribution of wealth, and a way to reconcile the social with the ecological. We need to work smarter, not harder.Critical, yet full of encouragement, Maja Göpel chooses surprising and enlightening examples to illustrate how we can leave behind our familiar ways of living to achieve a better future.

Quadratic equations, Pythagoras' theorem, imaginary numbers, and pi - you may remember studying these at school, but did anyone ever explain why? Never fear - bestselling science writer, and your new favourite maths teacher, Michael Brooks, is here to help.In The Maths That Made Us, Brooks reminds us of the wonders of numbers: how they enabled explorers to travel far across the seas and astronomers to map the heavens; how they won wars and halted the HIV epidemic; how they are responsible for the design of your home and almost everything in it, down to the smartphone in your pocket. His clear explanations of the maths that built our world, along with stories about where it came from and how it shaped human history, will engage and delight. From ancient Egyptian priests to the Apollo astronauts, and Babylonian tax collectors to juggling robots, join Brooks and his extraordinarily eccentric cast of characters in discovering how maths made us who we are today.

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists who uncovered the Panama Papers, a gripping, real-life thriller following the authors' attempt to uncover the truth about one of the world's most wanted men. Karl Lee, alias Li Fangwei, plays a key role in the secret struggle between the world powers, bypassing Western sanctions to supply dictators with the weapons they need to wipe out their neighbouring countries - or even to trigger a third world war.For almost two decades, intelligence agencies have been hunting for Karl Lee. The FBI has put a $5 million bounty on his head, but nobody has been able to catch him. Now, four award-winning investigative journalists set out to find him.Following the routes of his deliveries and his money, the authors track down Karl Lee's businesses in China and uncover his network of shell companies. During their investigation, they get embroiled deeper and deeper in the shady world of the Chinese phantom, and realise that Karl Lee is just a pawn in a much bigger game of modern warfare and international espionage.

A panoramic novel of European history, by an internationally bestselling writer. The whole truth, as the name implies, is the collective knowledge of all those involved. Which is why you can never piece it together again properly afterwards. Because a few of those who possessed a part of it are always already dead. Or lying, or their memories are bad. It's 1989, and in a small town on the Austria-Hungary border, nobody talks about the war; the older residents pretend not to remember, and the younger ones are too busy making plans to leave. The walls are thin, the curtains twitch, there is a face at every window, and everyone knows what they are not supposed to say.But as thousands of East German refugees mass at the border, it seems that the past is knocking on Darkenbloom's door.Still, though, nobody talks about the war.Until a mysterious visitor shows up asking questions.Until townspeople start receiving threatening letters and even disappearing.Until a body is found.Darkenbloom is a sweeping novel of exiled counts, Nazis-turned-Soviet-enforcers, secret marriages, mislabelled graves, remembrance, guilt, and the devastating power of silence, by one of Austria's most significant contemporary writers.

A captivating exploration of how underwater animals tap into sound to survive, and a clarion call for humans to address the ways we invade these critical soundscapes - from an award-winning science writer.For centuries humans ignored sound in the 'silent world' of the ocean, assuming that what we couldn't perceive, didn't exist. But we couldn't have been more wrong. Marine scientists now have the technology to record and study the complex interplay of the myriad sounds in the sea. Finally, we can trace how sounds travel with the currents, bounce from the seafloor and surface, bend with temperature, and even saltiness; how sounds help marine life survive; and how human noise can transform entire marine ecosystems.In Sing Like Fish, award-winning science journalist Amorina Kingdon synthesises historical discoveries with the latest research in a clear and compelling portrait of this sonic undersea world. From plainfin midshipman fish, whose swim-bladder drumming is so loud it keeps houseboat-dwellers awake, to the syntax of whalesong, from the deafening crackle of snapping shrimp, to underwater earthquakes and volcanoes, sound plays a vital role in feeding, mating, parenting, navigating, and warning. Meanwhile, our seas also echo with human-made sound, and we are only just learning how these pervasive noises can mask mating calls, chase animals from their food, and even wound creatures.Intimate and artful, Sing Like Fish tells a uniquely complete story of ocean animals' submerged sounds, envisions a quieter future, and offers a profound new understanding of the world below the surface.

Elegant, slippery, and provocative, Antiquity is a queer Lolita story by prize-winning Swedish author Hanna Johansson - a story of desire, power, obsession, observation, and taboo.Antiquity follows its unnamed narrator, a lonely woman in her thirties who becomes enamoured of a chic older artist, Helena, after interviewing her for a magazine. Helena invites the narrator to join her in the Greek city of Ermoupoli where she summers with her teenage daughter Olga. At first an object of jealousy, Olga morphs into an object of desire as the pull of Helena is transposed onto her daughter and the prospect of becoming someone's first, if perverse, lover.With echoes of Death in Venice, Call Me by Your Name, The Lover, and Lolita, but wholly original and contemporary, Antiquity probes the depths of memory, power, and the narratives that arrange our experience of the world.

A Guardian book to look out for in 2024An insightful exploration of the nature of inequality by the internationally bestselling author of Capital in the Twenty-First Century.In his newest work, Thomas Piketty explores how social inequality manifests itself very differently depending on the society and epoch in which it arises. History and culture play a central role, inequality being strongly linked to various socio-economic, political, civilisational, and religious developments. So it is culture in the broadest sense that makes it possible to explain the diversity, extent, and structure of the social inequality that we observe every day.Piketty briefly and concisely presents a lively synthesis of his work, taking up such diverse topics as education, inheritance, taxes, and the climate crisis, and provides exciting food for thought for a highly topical debate: Does natural inequality exist?

A veteran Wall Street Journal reporter dives into the world of billion-dollar traders and high-stakes crisis predictors who strive to turn extreme events into financial windfalls. There's no doubt that our world has gotten more extreme. Pandemics, climate change, superpower rivalries, technological disruption, political radicalisation, religious fundamentalism - all threaten chaos that put trillions in assets at risk. But around the world, across a wide variety of disciplines, would-be super-forecasters are trying to take the guesswork out of what formerly seemed like random chance. Some put their faith in 'black swans' - unpredictable, catastrophic events that can't be foreseen but send exotic financial instruments screaming in high-profit directions. Most famous among this group of big-bet traders are those who run the Universa fund, who, on days of extreme upheaval, have made as much as $1 billion.Author Scott Patterson gained exclusive access to Universa strategists and met with savvy seers in a variety of fields, from earthquake prediction to counterterrorism to climatology, to see if it's actually possible to bet on disaster - and win. Riveting, relevant, and revelatory, this is a must-read for anyone curious about how some of today's investors alchemise catastrophe into profit.

A haunting debut novel where dreams, family, and spirits collide.Night after night, Mackenzie - a young Cree woman living in Vancouver - has dreams that return her to a memory from before her sister Sabrina's untimely death. But when the waking world starts closing in, too - crows stalk her every move around the city; she gets threatening text messages from someone claiming to be Sabrina - Mackenzie knows this is more than she can handle alone. Desperate for help, she returns to her mother, sister, cousin, and aunties in her small Alberta hometown. Together, they try to uncover what is haunting Mackenzie before it's too late.

'Darkly funny, astute, timely' Sofie Laguna, author of The Eye of the Sheep'Powerful, restless, irresistible' Laura Jean McKay, author of The Animals in That CountryA black comedy, set in suburbia, about one woman's struggle to be free.When Winona Dalloway begins her day - in the peaceful early hours before her children, that 'tiny tornado of little hands and feet', wake up - she doesn't know that by the end of it, everything in her world will have changed.On the outside, Winona is a seemingly unremarkable young mother: unobtrusive, quietly going about her tasks. But within is a vivid, chaotic self, teeming with voices - a mind both wild and precise.And meanwhile, a storm is brewing ...

A young woman, torn between two cultures, belonging to neither. ¿A family, torn apart by a war they had no choice about.Ki¿u calls herself Kim because it's easier for Europeans to pronounce. She knows little about her Vietnamese family's history until she receives a Facebook message from her estranged uncle in America, telling her that her grandmother is dying. Her father and uncle haven't spoken since the end of the Vietnam War. One brother supported the Vietcong, while the other sided with the Americans.When Ki¿u and her parents travel to America to join the rest of the family in California to open her grandmother's will, questions relating to their past-to what has been suppressed -resurface and demand to be addressed.

What does it take to report from conflict zones? What good is neutrality in the face of suffering, and how much difference can one person make?From her first journalistic assignment in Gaza to covering the Arab Spring in Egypt, Sherine Tadros searched for ways to change people's lives for the better.It wasn't until her life fell apart that she found the courage to pursue her true purpose. With compassion and verve, Tadros now shares her remarkable journey, from witnessing injustice to fighting it in the corridors of power. In probing the line between journalism and activism, her memoir Taking Sides demonstrates why stories matter - and how we can all use our voices to inspire meaningful change.

Reena hates rainy days. She hates the way the dark clouds make everything look so dull.Rekha loves rainy days. She loves the way the rain makes the earth smell.When Rekha spots a rainbow, she rushes indoors to tell her sister about it. Reena will want to paint it, for sure!But when the sisters go outside to find it, the rainbow disappears. Where could it have gone? A vibrantly illustrated tale about finding light even in the gloomiest of times, How to Find a Rainbow will warm your heart - and give you a handy guide to making your own rainbow, too!

What happens when our oldest stories fail us? When all the rules have changed? The classic myth of Persephone - reimagined for a modern-day reader.Persephone spends six months under the ground with her husband, king of the dead, and six months on earth with her mother, goddess of the harvest. It has been this way for nine thousand years. But when she emerges this spring, something is different. Rains lash the land, crops grow out of season or not at all, there are people trying to build a road through the woods, and her mother does not seem able to stop them. The natural world is changing rapidly and even the gods have lost control. While Demeter tries to regain her powers and fend off her daughter's husband, who wants to drag his queen back underground for good, Persephone finally gets a taste of freedom. But what will this mean for her mother, her husband, and for the new shoots of life inside her?

From the author of The Picture Bride, two women¿s lives and identities are intertwined ¿ through World War II and the Korean War ¿ revealing the harsh realities of class division in the early part of the 20th century. Can¿t I Go Instead follows the lives of the daughter of a Korean nobleman and her maidservant in the early 20th century. When the daughter¿s suitor is arrested as a Korean Independence activist, and she is implicated during the investigation, she is quickly forced into marriage to one of her father¿s Japanese employees and shipped off to the United States. At the same time, her maidservant is sent in her mistress¿s place to be a comfort woman to the Japanese Imperial army.Years of hardship, survival, and even happiness follow. In the aftermath of WWII, the women make their way home, where they must reckon with the tangled lives they¿ve led, in an attempt to reclaim their identities, and find their places in an independent Korea.

A Guardian Best Fiction Book of 2023The brilliant new short story collection from the Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning author of The Animals in That Country. A family of cat farmers gets the chance to set the felines free. A group of chickens tells it like it is. A female-crewed ship ploughs through the patriarchy. A support group finds solace in a world without men.With her trademark humour, energy, and flair, McKay offers glimpses of places where dreams subsume reality, where childhood restarts, where humans embrace their animal selves and animals talk like humans.The stories in Gunflower explode and bloom in mesmerising ways, showing the world both as it is and as it could be.

`Astonishing¿ Emily Perkins, author of Lioness`Beautifully lyrical¿ Mat Osman, bassist of Suede and author of The Ghost TheatreA lyrical and ambitious exploration of madness and what it is like to experience the world differently, from the Booker Prize¿longlisted author of The Chimes.In Ueno Park, Tokyo, as workers and tourists gather for lunch, the pollen blows, a fountain erupts, pigeons scatter, and two women meet, changing the course of one another¿s lives.Dinah has come to Japan from New Zealand to teach English and grieve the death of her brother, Michael, a troubled genius who was able to channel his problems into music as a classical pianist ¿ until he wasn¿t. In the seemingly empty, eerie apartment block where Dinah has been housed, she sees Michael everywhere, even as she feels his absence sharply.Yasuko is polished, precise, and keenly observant ¿ of her students and colleagues at the language school, and of the natural world. When she was thirteen, animals began to speak to her, to tell her things she did not always want to hear. She has suppressed these powers for many years, but sometimes she allows them to resurface, to the dismay of her adult son, Jun. One day, she returns home, and Jun has gone. Even her special gifts cannot bring him back.As these two women deal with their individual traumas, they form an unlikely friendship in which each will help the other to see a different possible world, as Smaill teases out the tension between our internal and external lives and asks what we lose by having to choose between them.

A gripping new investigation into the underbelly of digital technology, which reveals not only how costly the virtual world is, but how damaging it is to the environment.If digital technology were a country, it would be the third-highest consumer of electricity behind China and the United States.Every year, streaming technology generates as much greenhouse gas as Spain - close to 1 per cent of global emissions.One Google search uses as much electricity as a lightbulb left on for up to two minutes.It turns out that the 'dematerialised' digital world, essential for communicating, working, and consuming, is much more tangible than we would like to believe. Today, it absorbs 10 per cent of the world's electricity and represents nearly 4 per cent of the planet's carbon dioxide emissions. We are struggling to understand these impacts, as they are obscured to us in the mirage of 'the cloud'.The result of an investigation carried out over two years on four continents, The Dark Cloud reveals the anatomy of a technology that is virtual only in name. Under the guise of limiting the impact of humans on the planet, it is already asserting itself as one of the major environmental challenges of the twenty-first century.

Published for the first time in English, the sweeping debut novel set in bohemian Paris, by the author of international bestseller The Eighth Life. In 1953, a teenage girl, Jeanne Saré, jumps in front of a train at the Gare du Nord station. She leaves behind writings that to some are unreadable, but to others tell universal, unspoken truths about the lives and struggles of women. When published in the 1970s, her work triggers a rash of copycat suicides. It is hastily withdrawn from sale and eventually forgotten about. Then, in 2004, two women from opposite corners of the globe - Amsterdam and Sydney - rediscover Jeanne Saré's book and set out to discover who the author was and what happened to her. Women across the ages have attached their own stories to Saré's, often with devastating results, but the truth about her may be even stranger than the fictions they have invented.

Hani, Kasih and Saya have been friends since they were kids. After years apart, they meet to pick up where they left off. But it's clear, they can't escape the racism that accompanies their daily lives: glances, chatter, hatred and right-wing terror. Until one dramatic night shakes everything up. An uncompromising novel of unconditional friendship.

LONGLISTED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZEA joyful family saga about free will, forgiveness, and how we are all interconnected.In October 1989, triplet babies are born into chaos in a Swedish hospital. Over two decades later, the siblings are scattered around the world, barely speaking. Sebastian is in London working for a mysterious scientific organisation and falling in love. Clara has travelled to Easter Island to join a doomsday cult. And the third triplet, Matilda, is in Sweden, practising being a stepmother. Then something happens that forces them to reunite. Their mother calls with worrying news: their father has gone missing and she has something to tell them, a twenty-five-year secret that will change all their lives ...'Hilarious' CLAIRE LOMBARDO'Playfully experimental' THE GUARDIAN'Magnificent' THE TELEGRAPH

A Daily Express Book of the Year'Engrossing ... grips you and doesn't let go.' The Spectator'Waterdrinker's gift for savage comedy and his war correspondent's eye have few contemporary equivalents.' The Times?A thrilling escapade through the Soviet Union of the '90s and early 2000s by a tour guide turned smuggler turned novelist, that tells the unputdownable story of modern Russia. One day, in 1988, a priest knocks on Pieter Waterdrinker's door with an unusual request: will he smuggle seven thousand bibles into the Soviet Union? Pieter agrees, and soon finds himself living in the midst of one of the biggest social and cultural revolutions of our time, working as a tour operator ... with a sideline in contraband. During the next thirty years, he witnesses, and is sometimes part of, the seismic changes that transform Russia into the modern state we know it as today. This riveting blend of memoir and history provides startling insight into the emergence of one of the world's most powerful and dangerous countries, as well as telling a nail-biting, laugh-out-loud adventure story that will leave you on the edge of your seat.

A mesmerising novel set in Japan, by the author of Rainbirds and The Perfect World of Miwako Sumida, about a young man trying to escape his past.When Shoji Arai crosses one of his company's most powerful clients, he must leave Akakawa immediately or risk his life. But his girlfriend Yoko is nowhere to be found.Haunted by dreams of drowning and the words of a fortune teller who warned him away from three women with water in their names, he travels to Tokyo, where he tries in vain to track Yoko down. But Shoji soon realises that not everything Yoko told him about herself was true. Who is the real woman he once lived with and loved, and where could she be hiding?Watersong is a spellbinding novel of loves lost and recovered, of secrets never spoken, and of how our pasts shape our futures.

From New York Times bestselling author and Mountain Goats singer/songwriter John Darnielle, an epic, gripping novel about murder, truth, artistic obsession, and the dangers of storytelling.Gage Chandler is a true crime writer, with one grisly success - and movie adaptation - to his name, along with a series of subsequent lesser efforts that have paid the bills but not much more. Now he is being offered the chance for his big break: to move into 'The Devil House', in which a briefly notorious pair of murders occurred, apparently the work of disaffected 1980s teens. He begins his research with diligence and enthusiasm, but soon the story leads him into a puzzle he never expected - his own work and what it means, the very core of what he does and who he is.

A stunning Australian love story for readers of Brokeback Mountain.It's the 1950s in conservative Australia, and Christopher, a young gay man, moves to 'the City' to escape the repressive atmosphere of his tiny hometown. Once there, however, he finds that it is just as censorial and punitive in its own way.Then Christopher meets Morgan, and the two fall in love - a love that breathes truth back into Christopher's stifled life. But the society around them remains rigid and unchanging, and what begins as a refuge for both men inevitably buckles under the intensity of navigating a world that wants them to refuse what they are. Will their devotion be enough to keep them together?Marlo takes us into the landscape of a relationship defined as much by what is said and shared as by what has to remain unsaid.