Wave magazine

Alan Stewart

If you’re one of the many who watch programmes like Who do you Think you Are?, longing for the time and know-how to do your own family research, this is the book for you. Written by a renowned expert on family history, this accessible guide offers exactly what you need to trace your roots and uncover what lurks beneath the folklore of your family!

Budding genealogists can track migrating relatives, check out the very latest internet resources and even the most tentative of sleuths will be launched on an unforgettable journey of discovery. If you want to look forward to better times, so said Edmund Burke, you have to look back, and as a map and guide, this book cannot currently be beaten.

(Penguin, ISBN 9780140515886)

Ralph Quinlan Forde

Written by holistic medical consultant, herbalist and aromatherapist, Ralph Quinlan Forde, this book is a comprehensive, beautifully illustrated guide to what we’d now refer to as a fully integrated healing system. It’s accessible, thought-provoking and about asfar from conventional NHS-style approaches to health and wellbeing as it’s possible to be!

(Gaia ISBN 9781856752763)

Laura Burgess

While the lifestyle pages in most of the mainstream media would have you believe that jetting off in pursuit of sun or adventures that the uninspired just cannot muster in the UK is perfectly normal and acceptable, Laura Burgess and her colleagues at Greenguide know better.

Sure, there’s nothing wrong with escaping for a while, but destroying the planet on the journey to your brief sojourn in utopia, or trashing local environments because you’re worth it, just isn’t acceptable! Thankfully it doesn’t have to be that way, and this guide is packed with ideas to prove it.

(Greenguide ISBN 9781905731404)

Making Sense of Life’s Scarcest Commodity

We may as well just admit it, we’re obsessed with time. Whether we’re dominated by clock time or harried by inner time, many of us would claim to be time poor and yet, according to Klein, the time on our wrists reveals very little about the way in which our bodies experience the day.

This incredibly enlightening and entertaining book explores the hidden dimensions of time and poses such questions as why do we measure time in financial terms, and can we really ‘have’ it or ‘waste’ it? It even offers a timetable showing how our biological clock sets our agenda for the day. Fascinating stuff, and perhaps more useful than any time management guides which tend to overlook this important background information.

Stefan Klein (Penguin, ISBN 9780141034638)

A gardening book for children

Gorgeously nostalgic, beautifully designed and delightfully informative, this fun guide to gardening is perfect for any Wavelets showing the merest hint of green in their fingers. Using vintage art to illustrate growing plants, vegetables and fruits indoors, this excellent spiral bound project book offers children something to grow all year round from tiny spring eggshell gardens in April to pressing flowers in September and starting plants from leaves in November. It teaches the meaning of key words and explains the roles of light, air and water in plants’ development. It even has space for making month-by-month gardening notes for the future. All in all, a superbly creative guide, stunningly conceived.

Tina Davis Stewart, Tabori and Chang, ISBN 9781584796732