Eduardo Saverin and Mark Zuckerberg - an awkward maths prodigy and a painfully shy computer genius - were never going to fit in at elite, polished Harvard. Yet that all changed when master-hacker Mark crashed the university's entire computer system by creating a rateable database of female students. Narrowly escaping expulsion, the two misfits refocused the site into something less controversial - 'The Facebook' - and watched as it spread like a wildfire across campuses around the country, along with their popularity.Yet amidst the dizzying levels of cash and glamour, as silicon valley, venture capitalists and reams of girls beckoned, the first cracks in their friendship started to appear, and what began as a simple argument spiralled into an out-and-out war. The great irony is that Facebook succeeded by bringing people together - but its very success tore two best friends apart.

It struck Bill Bryson one day that we devote a lot more time to the Wars of the Roses or the Normandy Landings than considering what most of history really consists of: centuries upon centuries of people quietly going about their daily business - eating, sleeping, having sex, endeavouring to be amused. So he started a journey around his house, an old rectory in Norfolk, wandering from room to room considering how the ordinary things in life came to be. Along the way he allowed himself delightful digressions on the history of everything from architecture to epidemics, from food preservation to the discovery of electricity, and from crinolines to toilets. And to his dismay, he also encountered a terrifying variety of dangers to our health and happiness.Where the prizewinning A Short History of Nearly Everything was a sweeping survey of Earth, the universe and everything, At Home is an inwards look at all human life through a domestic telescope. Because, as Bryson says, our homes aren't refuges from history. They are where history begins and ends.

To rattle off the hits of Neil and Tim Finn reads like a checklist of recent pop history. And to think it all began in sleepy rural Te Awamutu - a town whose name had a 'truly sacred ring', as Neil would famously recount - where Brian Timothy Finn fell in love with the Beatles, an obsession that would also work its way straight into his younger brother Neil's DNA. Success for the brothers was a long time coming: it took several turbulent years in Split Enz - an art-pop band Neil would join in 1977, despite Tim's reservations - before they produced a genuine hit and connected with the mainstream. And it was achieved by one of Neil's songs, 'I Got You', which wasn't the sweetest pill brother Tim had ever tasted. After all, Split Enz was his band, his odyssey, his obsession.When the Enz came undone, their paths split. Neil led world-beaters Crowded House, while Tim immersed himself in a series of bold if not always successful solo projects. Eventually the brothers reunited, leading to 'Woodface', an album considered by many to be Crowded House's finest. Yet that house proved to be a little too crowded, and Tim was fired from the band, before reuniting with Neil again for two hugely rewarding Finn records, though neither came without their fair share of fraternal conflict. Today, the Auckland-based Finns - both OBEs, ARIA Hall of Famers and proud fathers - remain as popular and credible as at any time in their respective careers.Based on interviews, critical analysis, extensive research and more than 30 years of Finns watching and listening, Together/Alone is the first biography written about the Finn brothers: Tim, the 'closet drummer' and accidental bandleader, Neil the guarded family man. This is a story of breakthroughs, breakdowns, sibling rivalry and respect - and some of the best pop songs this side of Lennon and McCartney.

"As far back as stories go, pioneers have reached for the skies. In the last two hundred years, they have mastered the air and made the modern world possible. Today they are bringing outer space within our reach. They're inventors and toymakers, amateurs and adventurers, visionaries, dreamers and, yes, crackpots. Some have called them irresponsible, even dangerous. But I have met many of them. I have worked with them, and funded them, and flown with them. I admire them, and trust them, and I think they and their kind are our future. In this book I look at the history of flight through the stories and people who have inspired me throughout my life. In these pages you will find stories of miraculous rescues; of records made and broken; of surprising feats of endurance and survival, including some of my own adventures, as well as developments in the future of air (and space) travel. It is a story of pioneers, and of course it includes the world famous Montgolfiers and the Wright brothers, but I also want to describe some of the lesser-known trailblazers. People like Tony Jannus, who in 1914 created the first scheduled commercial flight in the world, flying his passengers over the waters of Tampa Bay at an altitude of just fifty feet! The 'bird man' Leo Valentin, who in the 1950s jumped from 9,000 feet with wooden wings attached to his shoulders. And my friend Steve Fossett, who dedicated his life to breaking records and having adventures." This is their story. It is also, in a small way, my own.

Piers has got a new job. He's off to America to be the 'Nasty Brit' judging the show America's Got Talent - surely a role he was made for? And with unprecedented access to people, places and parties on both sides of the pond, he'll get the inside scoop on the world of celebrity Stateside. So what could possibly go wrong?Well, it's not all plain sailing. Piers finds himself snubbed by the paparazzi and subjected to national ridicule by Alan Sugar. As well as foolishly embarking on a visit to the Playboy Mansion with his girlfriend he also becomes one of the only people to fall off the 'idiot-proof' Segway (George Bush fell off one too).Somehow though, Piers still manages to get invited to all the best parties. Perhaps because he keeps being mistaken for David Cameron? From chinwags with Naomi Campbell to a cigar-smoking session with Arnold Schwarzenegger; hilarious tête-à-têtes with everyone from Boris Johnson to Cheryl Cole; and many bizarre encounters with the likes of Paris Hilton, Tony Blair and Jay-Z, Piers is his usual candid, honest, loudmouth self as he lifts the lid on Tinsel Town.With the background cries of 'Please don't embarrass us Dad!' from his sons, the Big Mouth Brit embarks on his hilarious American adventure, and suffers just a few mishaps along the way.

Twenty years ago Frances Mayes, having ended a long marriage and begun a new relationship, was travelling in Italy and happened upon an abandoned, grand but dilapidated three-storey house called 'Bramasole' just outside the Tuscan hillside of Cortona. Mayes fell immediately in love with the house and eventually bought it and began a long and arduous restoration of it. The process of making Bramasole her home - and simultaneously of establishing a new life (and a new outlook on life) in Italy - were the subjects of her bestselling memoirs UNDER THE TUSCAN SUN and BELLA TUSCANY. In the decade since BELLA TUSCANY was published, Mayes has gone from being a proud resident of Cortona to one of its most esteemed citizens as well as Tuscany's literary doyenne. Her books are endlessly devoured and discussed by book groups, her speaking engagements and readings are mobbed, and Bramasole's gates receive daily visits from fans from around the world. In this new memoir Mayes offers her readers another deeply personal account of her present-day life in Tuscany, encompassing both the changes she has experienced since UNDER THE TUSCAN SUN and BELLA TUSCANY appeared, and sensuous, evocative reflections on the timeless, unchanging beauty and simple pleasures of Italian life. Among the themes Mayes examines are how her life in the mountains introduced her to a 'wilder' side of Tuscany and with it a new scale of engagement among Tuscany's mountain people. Throughout she thoughtfully muses on the many concerete joys of building an Italian life: Tuscan icons that connect with her life and have become for her storehouses of memory; crucible moments from which bigger ideas have emerged; how a significant part of her adjustment to Italian metabolism has awakened her to the possibilities in spontaneity and trust in instinc t; and reflections on the writing life she has enjoyed in the room where UNDER THE TUSCAN SUN began and on the wider view she's gained since then.