When it comes to immigration, the population explosion, the collapse of the family, the north-south divide, devolution, or the death of the countryside, common wisdom tells us that we are in trouble; however, this is far from the truth. In his brilliant anatomy of contemporary Britain, leading geographer Daniel Dorling dissects the nation and reveals unexpected truths about the way we live today, contrary to what you might read in the news: The human mosaic: Most children who live above the fourth floor of tower blocks in England are Black or Asian. The higher you go in a building, the darker skinned children tend to be.

Relationships: The more times a person’s heart is broken, the nearer they will tend to move to the sea. If you want to find a good man to marry head for the countryside. North and South: People in the south move home on average every seven years and job every eight years.

This is a year faster than in the north of England, but a year slower than is usual in Scotland. Optimum population: Emmigrant nation – There are twice as many grandchildren of British-born people living over-seas as there are people living in Britain who have grandparents who were themselves born abroad. The problem now is more about getting pregnant than a population explosion and we need more immigration not less.

Immigration: Muslims are far more likely to marry non-Muslims in Britain than Christians are to marry non-Christians. The elderly: Most people in Britain never live long enough to experience being burgled. In some areas you would have to live for over five hundred years to have an ‘evens’ chance of being a crime victim.

Town and Country – divided since the enclosures: Step children are most commonly found in the most leafy of idyllic rural villages. Nuclear family homogeneity is now an inner city phenomena. Why are there no cheap homes in the countryside any more? Transport: The greatest threat to life in Britain of all those aged under 40 is the car.

For adults aged over 24 they most likely die as a driver, over 15 as a passenger, and over age 4 as a pedestrian. Work: There is no need for us to work until we drop – all could retire early. Reviews for “Injustice”: ‘A geographer maps the injustices of Selfish Capitalism with scholarly detachment’ – Oliver James.

‘Dorling provides the brain-cleaning software we need to begin creating a happier society’ – Richard Wilkinson author of “The Spirit Level”.

This title is a beautifully written and illustrated collection of Greek myths containing seventeen famous tales full of love, loss, greed, envy and bravery. Beautifully written by Ann Turnbull and illustrated by Sarah Young, this collection of seventeen Greek myths is truly something to treasure. The timeless stories of Theseus and the Minotaur, Persephone, King Midas, Ariadne, Orpheus and Eurydice, and Echo and Narcissus are told with great freshness and there is a good balance between the gentler myths and the ones packed with battles and monsters.

It is a wonderful collection and a wonderful introduction to the fascinating world of Greek mythology, brought to life by one of our finest writers and an exciting new illustrator.

Laugh your socks off! Stripy sharks and woolly crocs, Purple dogs with polka dots! What can you see made from Socks? Kids (and grownups!) will love this socktastic celebration of the nation’s favourite footwear. Look out for sockerels, sockodiles and Goldisocks, and prepare to see your socks in a whole new light.

The wilderness is much closer than you think. Passed through, negotiated, unnamed, unacknowledged: the edgelands – those familiar yet ignored spaces which are neither city nor countryside – have become the great wild places on our doorsteps. In the same way the Romantic writers taught us to look at hills, lakes and rivers, poets Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts write about mobile masts and gravel pits, business parks and landfill sites, taking the reader on a journey to marvel at these richly mysterious, forgotten regions in our midst.

“Edgelands” forms a critique of what we value as ‘wild’, and allows our allotments, railways, motorways, wasteland and water a presence in the world, and a strange beauty all of their own.

Thomas Nesbitt is a divorced American writer in the midst of a rueful middle age. Living a very private life in Maine – in touch only with his daughter and still trying to reconcile himself to the end of a long marriage that he knew was flawed from the outset – he finds his solitude disrupted by the arrival, one wintry morning, of a box postmarked Berlin. The return address on the box – Dussmann – unsettles him completely.

For it is the name of the woman with whom he had an intense love affair twenty-six years ago in Berlin – at a time when the city was cleaved in two, and personal and political allegiances were haunted by the deep shadows of the Cold War. Refusing initially to confront what he might find in that box, Thomas nevertheless finds himself forced to grapple with a past he has never discussed with any living person – and in the process relive those months in Berlin, when he discovered, for the first and only time in his life, the full, extraordinary force of true love. But Petra Dussmann – the woman to whom he lost his heart – was not just a refugee from a police state, but also someone who lived with an ongoing sorrow beyond dreams…and one which gradually rewrote both their destinies.

In this, his tenth novel, Douglas Kennedy has written that rare thing: a love story as morally complex as it is tragic and deeply reflective. Brilliantly gripping, it is an atmospherically dense, ethically tangled tale of romantic certainty and conflicting loyalties, all set amidst a stunningly rendered portrait of Berlin in the final dark years before “The Wall” came down. Like all of Kennedy’s previous, critically acclaimed bestselling novels, “The Moment” is both unputdownable and profound.

Posing so many searching questions about why and how we fall in love – and the tangled way we project on to others that which our hearts seek – it is a love story of great epic sweep and immense emotional power.