We don't think too much about sex; we're merely thinking about it in the wrong way.

So asserts Alain de Botton in this rigorous and supremely honest book designed to help us navigate the intimate and exciting - yet often confusing and difficult - experience that is sex. Few of us tend to feel we're entirely normal when it comes to sex, and what we’re supposed to be feeling rarely matches up with the reality. This audiobook argues that 21st-century sex is ultimately fated to be a balancing act between love and desire, and adventure and commitment.

Find life-enhancing work and realise your potential with this enlightening read. This is a book about how to take working life in new directions – how to negotiate the labyrinth of choices, how to think about personal ambitions and motivations, and ultimately how to take concrete steps to finding a fulfilling career. It is a self-help book with a difference. Standard career guides are filled with pop psychology and bullet-point advice for writing CVs and making action plans, but How to Find Fulfilling Work casts its net wider.

Emotional intelligence affects every aspect of the way we live, from romantic to professional relationships, from our inner resilience to our social success. It is the ultimate soft skill of the 21st century. It is also the core focus area of the hugely successful School of Life organisation, founded and run by reigning master of popular philosophy, Alain de Botton. For 10 years this organisation has offered practical guidance and wisdom, from a team of world class specialists, to ordinary people who want to live better.

Unpick the complexities of our digital world and discover how to live well within it. Over the last decade, through digital media, we have crossed a number of significant thresholds: the interconnection of over half of the world’s adult population through mobile telephony and the internet and the devotion of more than half the waking hours of a western generation to mediated experience.

At dinner parties and over coffee, Rabih and Kirsten's friends always ask them the same question: how did you meet? The answer comes easily - it's a happy story, one they both love to tell. But there is a second part to this story, the answer to a question their friends never ask: what happened next? Rabih and Kirsten find each other, fall in love, get married. Society tells us this is the end of the story. In fact it is only the beginning.

For decades we've been told that positive thinking is the key to a happy, rich life. "F*ck positivity," Mark Manson says. "Let's be honest, shit is f*cked, and we have to live with it." In his wildly popular Internet blog, Manson doesn't sugarcoat or equivocate. He tells it like it is - a dose of raw, refreshing, honest truth that is sorely lacking today. The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck is his antidote to the coddling, let's-all-feel-good mind-set that has infected modern society and spoiled a generation, rewarding them with gold medals just for showing up.

From everyday stress to severe trauma, many obstacles to a full life can be overcome by developing what Dr. Daniel J. Siegel calls "mindsight," our ability to perceive the mind and literally redirect the flow of energy and information within our brains. Through this powerful capacity for insight and empathy, we can "rewire" crucial connections, create dynamic linkages, and open ourselves to relationships in a new way.

Anders Ericsson has spent 30 years studying the special ones - the geniuses, sports stars and musical prodigies. And his remarkable finding, revealed in Peak, is that their special abilities are acquired through training. The innate 'gift' of talent is a myth. Exceptional individuals are born with just one unique ability, shared by us all - the ability to develop our brains and bodies through our own efforts.

Cal Newport's clearly written manifesto flies in the face of conventional wisdom by suggesting that it should be a person's talent and skill - and not necessarily their passion - that determines their career path. Newport, who graduated from Dartmouth College (Phi Beta Kappa) and earned a PhD from MIT, contends that trying to find what drives us, instead of focusing on areas in which we naturally excel, is ultimately harmful and frustrating to job seekers.

How did Fidel Castro fool the CIA for a generation? Why did Neville Chamberlain think he could trust Adolf Hitler? Why are campus sexual assaults on the rise? Do television sitcoms teach us something about the way we relate to each other that isn't true? While tackling these questions, Malcolm Gladwell was not solely writing a book for the page. He was also producing for the ear. In the audiobook version of Talking to Strangers, you’ll hear the voices of people he interviewed - scientists, criminologists, military psychologists.