In Growing Up Human, Brenna Hassett explores how our evolutionary history has shaped a phenomenon every reader will have experienced - childhood.

Tracking deep into our evolutionary history, anthropological science has begun to unravel one particular feature that sets us apart from the many, many animals that came before us - our uniquely long childhoods. Growing Up Human looks at how we have diverged from our ancestral roots to stay 'forever young' - or at least what seems like forever - and how the evolution of childhood is a critical part of the human story.

Beginning with a look at the ways animals invest in their offspring, the book moves through the many steps of making a baby, from pair-bonding to hidden ovulation, points where our species has repeatedly stepped off the standard primate path. From the mystery of monogamy to the minefield of modern parenting advice, biological anthropologist Brenna Hassett reveals how differences between humans and our closest cousins lead to our messy mating systems, dangerous pregnancies, and difficult births, and what these tell us about the kind of babies we are trying to build.

Using observations of our closest primate relatives, the tiny relics of childhood that come to us from the archaeological record, and the bones and teeth of our ancestors, science has started to unravel the evolution of our childhood right down the fossil record. In our species investment doesn't stop at birth, and as Growing Up Human reveals, we can compare every aspect of our care and feeding, from the chemical composition of our milk to our fondness for formal education from ancient times onwards, in order to understand just what we evolved our weird and wonderful childhoods for.

King Edward VIII is the only British King in history to have voluntarily abdicated. His refusal to give up his scandalous affair with married Wallis Simpson triggered a constitutional crisis that shook the monarchy and carved a bitter and excruciatingly public rift in the world’s most famous family.

But what if the abdication of King Edward VIII had deeper roots than his affair with Wallis, originating with a young prince’s fascination with the USA? In his new book, King Edward VIII: An American Life, esteemed royal historian Ted Powell challenges us to turn our view of King Edward VIII and his abdication on its head.

Powell reveals the prince’s first love: America. He argues that the irresistible freedom and modernity Edward tasted there shaped his intimate relationships and transformed his view of monarchy – setting him on a dangerous collision course with his rigid life of pomp and pageantry as King-in-waiting in interwar Britain. This laid the foundations for the explosive events to come.

As controversial in death as in life, Edward is branded a Nazi sympathiser and embarrassment to the Royal Family. But Powell argues that Edward was a peace-loving man and a progressive prince, who, if he’d remained king, was set to modernise the monarchy beyond anything we’ve seen from a reigning monarch in the 80 years since his abdication.

King Edward VIII is a rip-roaring ride from surfing trips, to cowboy ranches, to all-night jazz parties and strings of clandestine affairs – but it is also a fundamental reassessment of the role America played in the abdication of Edward VIII.

Fairy-Tales are not just fairy-tales: they are records of historical phenomena, telling us something about how Western civilisation was formed. In The Fairy Tellers, award-winning travel-writer Nick Jubber explores their secret history of fairy-tales: the people who told them, the landscapes that forged them, and the cultures that formed them.

While there are certain names inextricably entwined with the concept of a fairy-tale, such as the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen, the most significant tellers are long buried under the more celebrated figures who have taken the credit for their stories – people like the Syrian storyteller Youhenna Diab and the Wild Sisters of Cassel. Without them we would never have heard of Aladdin, his Magic Lamp or the adventures of Hansel and Gretel.

Tracking these stories to their sources carries us through the steaming cities of Southern Italy and across the Mediterranean to the dust-clogged alleys of the Maghreb, under the fretting leaves of the Black Forest, deep into the tundra of Siberia and across the snowy hills of Lapland.

From North Africa and Siberia, this book illuminates the complicated relationship between Western civilisation and the 'Eastern' cultures it borrowed from, and the strange lives of our long lost fairy-tellers.