The Times ‘entertaining psychological insights, Bloom’s underlying philosophical aims are profound’
Mil Millington, The Observer ‘manages to lift some weighty concepts with a lightness of touch. It’s genuinely thoughtful and thought-provoking’

'If you really want to understand human nature, you must observe people as they are before they are corrupted by language and culture, by MTV and Hebrew school. You must look at babies.' So contends psychologist Paul Bloom in this fascinating account of how we learn to make sense of reality. All humans see the world in two fundamentally different ways: Even babies have a rich understanding of both the physical and social worlds. They expect objects to obey principles of physics, and they're startled when things disappear or defy gravity. Yet they can also read emotions and respond with anger, sympathy, and joy. In Descartes' Baby, Bloom draws on a wealth of scientific discoveries to show how these two ways of knowing give rise to such uniquely human traits as humor, disgust, religion, art and morality. The myriad ways that our dualist perspectives, born in infancy, undergo development throughout our lives and profoundly influence out thoughts, feelings, and actions is the subject of this richly rewarding book.

A striking exploration of how new approaches to child development can illuminate our understanding of the feelings and beliefs that show us at our most human - humour, disgust, art, religion and morality - by 'the wunderkind of his generation of cognitive scientists' (Steven Pinker)

Paul Bloom is Professor of Psychology at Yale University.

Paul Carson is a doctor and novelist. He lives in Dublin with his wife and two children, where he runs an asthma and allergy clinic for children as well as writing.

This will be the fifth in the Blackwood Royal Marines series. The setting is fifties Malaya and Singapore, at the height of the new terrorist attempts to subvert the creation of the new federation. The Royal Marines, the Commandoes, were used in coastal and jungle operations at a time when it was said that the post-war promise of a stable and successful Malaya was on a knife-edge. There will be two Blackwoods in this story - a senior officer and a ranker!

The fifth novel in the Blackwood series - a must-have for all fans.

Douglas Reeman did convoy duty in the navy in the Atlantic, the Arctic, and the North Sea. He has written over thirty novels under his own name and more than twenty best-selling historical novels featuring Richard Bolitho under the pseudonym Alexander Kent.

Tempe Brennan has come to Montreal from Charlotte to testify as Ian expert witness at a trial. As Forensic Anthropologist for the province of Quebec, that's part of her job. Instead of going over her notes, however, she's freezing in the basement of a pizza parlour. Not fun. Not with all the rats. And the cold. And, now, the remains of three young women. When did they die? How did they get there?
Homicide detective Luc Claudel believes the bones are historic, and therefore, not his concern. Buttons from the nineteenth century have been found with the corpses, an indicator of the bones' probable age. But something doesn't make sense. Tempe will do Carbon 14 testing to establish approximate age. And she can analyse the tooth enamel to tell approximately where the women were born. If she's right, Claudel has three recent murders on his hands. Definitely his case.
Detective Andrew Ryan, meanwhile, is acting mysteriously. What are those private phone calls he takes, and why does he suddenly disappear just when Tempe is beginning to trust him and to hope he might be part of her life?
As Tempe searches for answers in both her personal and professional lives, she finds herself drawn deeper into a web of evil from which there may be no escape. Women have disappeared, never to return...Tempe may be next.

The small, unnamed Eastern bloc country of Olen Steinhauer's debut novel The Bridge of Sighs is taking its first tentative steps towards democracy. By command of the party chairman, the labour camps are being emptied of innocent civilians. The amnesty has begun.
But life isn't easy for the celebrated author, Ferenc Kolyeszar. He suffers from writer's block; the gnawing suspicion that his wife, Magda, is cheating on him with his best friend and partner, Stefan; and a malaise that has affected his day job as a homicide inspector. Then the artist Antonin Kullmann is found dead, his arms and legs shattered, his body set on fire. It's an exceptionally brutal murder. Peeling off the layers of deception and duplicity that surround the case, Ferenc discovers a secret that has ruined the lives of three men, and could ruin the lives of many more, particularly his own. As the country moves from a tenuous democracy into an even more totalitarian state, Ferenc learns what it means to be betrayed, what it means to be the betrayer.