The uplifting true story of a family who left their old life behind to spend a year living wild in a tent around Britain. With a baby and a toddler, mounting debt, work demands and stress trampling over their desire to spend time together as a family in nature, Jen and Sim Benson move out of their rented accommodation, sell up their possessions, and decide to live in a tent for a year as nomads around rural Britain in the search for a simpler, more meaningful way of life. This is the story of that year, the doubts, epiphanies and the weather, the hardships of each season experienced in the great outdoors. Chapters include At Home in Wiltshire and the Peak District, From London to Wilder Places, A Cottage on Dartmoor, Christmas Under Canvas in the Blackdown Hills, Restorations in Cornwall and the South Hams, The Kindness of Strangers in Dorset and on Exmoor, The Highs and Lows in the Lake District, Idyllic Summer Days in the Welsh Borders, Festivals and A Return to Dartmoor. With map and photos, 254pp.

Do you recoil in arachnophobic horror with the sight of a spider, or twitch with monophobia when you misplace your mobile phone? We are all guilty of book buying habits which verge on bibliomania! Mired in indecision? Would it be reassuring to give this a name - aboulomania? A Book of the Year In The Times, Financial Times, Spectator and Daily Mail and as heard on BBC Radio 4 Woman's Hour and Start the Week, plunge into this rich, surprising and stunningly designed A-Z compendium. Discover how our fixations have taken shape from the Middle Ages to the present day as bestselling author Kate Summerscale deftly traces the threads between past and present, psychological and social, personal and political. Our phobias and manias are contradictory and multiple, deeply intimate, yet forged by the times we live in. It is the most common form of anxiety disorder, but rarely given a formal diagnosis. There are phobias for washing, of course flying and heights and open spaces, but also frogs, thunder, clowns, blushing, seaweed, being touched, buttons (Koumpounophobia), dentists, smells, eggs, choking, beards, hoarding, forests, zoophobia (animals) andmany more. Endlessly fascinating popular science. Line art of rats and mice and spiders decorate the 256 pages. SIGNED BY THE AUTHOR.