Ruby Wax

Five hundred years ago no one died of stress: we have invented this concept, and now we let it rule us. Rest has become a dirty word, and our idea of satisfaction is answering the last email. We're sleepwalking through our own lives. Ruby Wax shows us how to wake up from this stupor with a scientific solution to modern problems: mindfulness.

Dear Listener, I know what you're thinking, is it some kind of macabre joke? How can Ruby Wax write a book about good news when the world is facing the worst disaster since the Plague? Let me explain. I began writing in 2018, back when the world's worries were somewhat different. Climate change, greedy bankers, exam results, crap politicians, mental health: these are still huge issues, but even the ancient soothsayers reading pig entrails couldn't have predicted this. This is my new mission: to share the green shoots of hope peeping through the soil of civilisation.

With a little help from a monk (who tells us how our mind works) and a neuroscientist (who tells us how our brain works), Ruby Wax answers every question you've ever had about evolution, thoughts, emotions, the body, addictions, relationships, sex, kids, the future and compassion. Filled with witty anecdotes from Ruby's own life, and backed up by smart science and practical mindfulness exercises, How to be Human is the only manual you need to help you upgrade your mind as much as you've upgraded your iPhone.

In this Audible Original, Ruby Wax hunts down her heroes - brain scientists - in the UK and across America, to learn more about what makes us tick: why we get stressed, how we feel pain, what makes us addicted - and has a lot of fun along the way. She faces death with Past Mortems author Carla Valentine, explores how video games affect our attention with gamification expert Gabe Zichermann, and discovers the benefits of vaginal smearing with Professor Tim Spector.

Ruby Wax - comedian, writer and mental health campaigner - shows us how our minds can jeopardize our sanity. With her own periods of depression and now a Masters from Oxford in Mindfulness-based Cognitive Therapy to draw from, she explains how our busy, chattering, self-critical thoughts drive us to anxiety and stress. If we are to break the cycle, we need to understand how our brains work, rewire our thinking and find calm in a frenetic world.

This workbook is a guide on how to drop anchor when life, and the world around you, gets too daunting. It's filled with exercises and information for when you're suddenly forced to confront the hard truths or as I like to call them, the BIG SIX realities - difficult emotions, uncertainty, loneliness, change, dissatisfaction and death. It isn't just about how to get through a pandemic.... Or the post-pandemic fall-out. It is a WAKE-UP call. One that will increase your awareness of every moment through mindfulness.

Jennifer Saunders' comic creations have brought joy to millions. From Comic Strip to Comic Relief, from Bolly-swilling Edina in Ab Fab to her takes on Madonna or Mamma Mia, her characters are household names. But it's Jennifer herself who has a place in all our hearts. This is her funny, moving, and frankly bonkers memoir, filled with laughter, friends, and occasional heartache - but never misery. Bonkers is full of riotous adventures.

Julie Walters has been described as the nation's most popular actress and comedienne. She has been delighting us on screen and on stage for over 25 years and - thanks to her undoubted talent, infectious spirit and self-deprecating humour - we have taken her to our hearts. Now she tells us her own story, in her own words. She was born in 50s Birmingham, daughter of an austere Irish Catholic mother.

Award-winning actor, creator of a myriad of memorable characters from Lady Whiteadder to Professor Sprout, Miriam Margolyes is a national treasure. Now, at last, at the age of 80, she has finally decided to tell her extraordinary life story. And it's far richer and stranger than any part she's played.

What does it mean to feel truly alive? Aged 24, Matt Haig's world caved in. He could see no way to go on living. This is the true story of how he came through crisis, triumphed over an illness that almost destroyed him and learned to live again. A moving, funny and joyous exploration of how to live better, love better and feel more alive, Reasons to Stay Alive is more than a memoir. It is a book about making the most of your time on earth.

'Between the Stops is a sort of a memoir, my sort. It's about a bus trip really, because it's my view from the Number 12 bus (mostly top deck, the seat at the front on the right), a double-decker that plies its way from Dulwich, in South East London, where I was living, to where I sometimes work - at the BBC, in the heart of the capital. It's not a sensible way to write a memoir at all, probably, but it's the way things pop into your head as you travel, so it's my way'.    

Superstar comedian and Hollywood box-office star Kevin Hart turns his immense talent to the written word by writing some words. Some of those words include: the, a, for, above, and even even. Put them together and you have the funniest, most heartfelt, and most inspirational memoir on survival, success, and the importance of believing in yourself since Old Yeller.

Why do you lose arguments with people who know MUCH LESS than you? Why can you recognise that woman, from that thing...but can't remember her name? And why, after your last break-up, did you find yourself in the foetal position on the sofa for days, moving only to wipe the snot and tears haphazardly from your face? Here's why: the idiot brain. For something supposedly so brilliant and evolutionarily advanced, the human brain is pretty messy, fallible and disorganised.

In his first full-length autobiography, comedy legend and national treasure Billy Connolly reveals the truth behind his windswept and interesting life. Born in a tenement flat in Glasgow in 1942, orphaned by the age of fourth and a survivor of appalling abuse at the hands of his own family, Billy's life is a remarkable story of success against all the odds.

Anne Lister was remarkable. Fearless, charismatic and determined to explore her lesbian sexuality, she forged her own path in a society that had no language to define her. She was a landowner, an industrialist and a prolific diarist whose output has secured her legacy as one of the most fascinating figures of the 19th century. Gentleman Jack: The Real Anne Lister follows Anne from her crumbling ancestral home in Yorkshire to the glittering courts of Denmark as she resolves to put past heartbreak behind her and find herself a wife.