Barney Library

Planting for Pollinators is an easy-to-use gardening guide to help you encourage different types of insect pollinators into your garden.

Insect pollinators not only bring joy to our gardens, they also provide an essential service for our planet. Without bees, flies, hoverflies, butterflies, moths and beetles, some of our favourite foods, flowers and plants would cease to exist.

Whether you have a large garden, an urban balcony or just a window box, planting to encourage pollinators is a fantastic and surprisingly easy first step in creating a wildlife-friendly space. Planting for Pollinators features a wide range of plants, with guidance on the best ways to nurture lawns and verges, pollinator predation and tips on watching and photographing wildlife. Beautifully illustrated throughout with images from award-winning wildlife photographer Heather Angel, this essential guide will show you how plants communicate with insects, and why it's so important to protect our pollinators.

Organised by season and featuring more than 100 plant species – including bulbs, annuals, perennials, shrubs and climbers – this practical guide will help you to discover the short- and long-term benefits of having a variety of pollinators visit your garden.

If you’re horticulturally challenged, then this book’s for you. Learn to be the best plant parent you can be with How to Keep Your Plants Alive, featuring over 50 houseplants that are exceptionally hard to kill.

We’ve all been there: your beloved plant is looking a little too droopy, but are you supposed to water it or have you overwatered it? Or maybe you meant to take care of it, but life got away from you and suddenly it’s been a week without any plant nurturement. When your houseplants continue to suffer no matter how much TLC you show them, it’s time to up your game with this beginner’s guide to plant parenting. With houseplant profiles detailing individual plant needs and vital tips, you’ll have all the knowledge you need to successfully care for your greenery. If you’d like to strike “Plant Assassin” from your résumé, then read on.

Inside you’ll find:
- 50+ low-maintenance houseplants with care and keeping instructions
- Tips for selecting the best houseplants for your home
- Warning signs for spotting a dying plant, plus the best rescue plans
- Beautiful illustrations of succulents, air plants, cacti, and more

Don’t have a green thumb? No problem. With How to Keep Your Plants Alive, your indoor plants will be flourishing in no time at all, no matter what you throw at them.

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER



"A smart, savvy road map through the mayhem of the cryptocurrency madness."

--RON CHERNOW, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Alexander Hamilton

From "one of the crypto industry's unlikely but most prominent critics" (Washington Post), an entertaining and well-researched account of the rise and fall of cryptocurrency.



At the height of the pandemic, TV star Ben McKenzie was the perfect mark for cryptocurrency: a dad stuck at home with some cash in his pocket, worried about his family, armed with only the vague notion that people were making heaps of money on something he--despite a degree in economics--didn't entirely understand. Lured in by grandiose, utopian promises, and sure, a little bit of FOMO, McKenzie dove deep into blockchain, Bitcoin, and the various other coins and exchanges on which they are traded. But after scratching the surface, he had to ask, "Am I crazy, or is this all a total scam?"



In Easy Money, McKenzie enlists the help of journalist Jacob Silverman for an investigative adventure into crypto and its remarkable crash. Weaving together stories of average traders and victims, colorful crypto "visionaries," Hollywood's biggest true believers, anti-crypto whistleblowers, and government operatives, Easy Money is an on-the-ground look at a perfect storm of irresponsibility and criminal fraud. Based on original reporting across the country and abroad, including interviews with Sam Bankman-Fried, Tether cofounder Brock Pierce, Celsius's Alex Mashinsky, and more, this is the book on cryptocurrency you've been waiting for.

From #1 New York Times bestselling author Jennifer Weiner comes a warmhearted and empowering new novel about love, family, friendship, secrets, and a life-changing journey.

Thirty-three-year-old Abby Stern has made it to a happy place. True, she still has gig jobs instead of a career, and the apartment where she’s lived since college still looks like she’s just moved in. But she’s got good friends, her bike, and her bicycling club in Philadelphia. She’s at peace with her plus-size body—at least, most of the time—and she’s on track to marry Mark Medoff, her childhood summer sweetheart, a man she met at the weight-loss camp that her perpetually dieting mother forced her to attend. Fifteen years after her final summer at Camp Golden Hills, when Abby reconnects with a half-his-size Mark, it feels like the happy ending she’s always wanted.

Yet Abby can’t escape the feeling that some­thing isn’t right...or the memories of one thrilling night she spent with a man named Sebastian two years previously. When Abby gets a last-minute invi­tation to lead a cycling trip from NYC to Niagara Falls, she’s happy to have time away from Mark, a chance to reflect and make up her mind.

But things get complicated fast. First, Abby spots a familiar face in the group—Sebastian, the one-night stand she thought she’d never see again. Sebastian is a serial dater who lives a hundred miles away. In spite of their undeniable chemistry, Abby is determined to keep her distance. Then there’s a surprise last-minute addition to the trip: her mother, Eileen, the woman Abby blames for a lifetime of body shaming and insecurities she’s still trying to undo.

Over two weeks and more than seven hundred miles, strangers become friends, hidden truths come to light, a teenage girl with a secret unites the riders in unexpected ways...and Abby is forced to reconsider everything she believes about herself, her mother, and the nature of love.

"There are few more skilled practitioners of the craft of summer fiction than Beatriz Williams." -- The New York Times Book Review

A ravishing summer read from New York Times bestseller Beatriz Williams, sweeping readers back to a mid-century New England rich with secrets and Cold War intrigue.

June 1946. As the residents of Winthrop Island prepare for the first summer season after the sacrifice of war, a glamorous new figure moves into the guest cottage at Summerly, the idyllic seaside estate of the wealthy Peabody family. To Emilia Winthrop, daughter of Summerly's year-round caretaker and a descendant of the island's settlers, Olive Rainsford opens a window into a world of shining possibility. While Emilia spent the war years caring for her incapacitated mother, Olive traveled the world, married fascinating men, and involved herself in political causes. She's also the beloved aunt of the two surviving Peabody sons, Amory and Shep, with whom Emilia has a tangled romantic history.

As the summer wears on, Emilia develops a deep rapport with Olive, who urges her to leave the island for a life of adventure, while romance blossoms with the sturdy and honorable Shep. But the heady promise of Peabody patronage is blown apart by the arrival of Sumner Fox, an FBI agent who demands Emilia's help to capture a Soviet agent who's transmitting vital intelligence on the West's atomic weapon program from somewhere inside the Summerly estate.

April 1954. Eight years later, Summerly is boarded up and Emilia has rebuilt her shattered life as a professor at Wellesley College, when shocking news arrives from Washington--the traitor she helped convict is about to be swapped for an American spy imprisoned in the Soviet Union, but with a mysterious condition only Emilia can fulfill. A reluctant Emilia is summoned to CIA headquarters, where she's forced to confront the harrowing consequences of her actions that fateful summer, and a choice that could destroy the Peabody family--and Emilia's chance for redemption--all over again.

"Grand and gripping...shot through with suspense, romance, and glorious, beach-laden locales. I could not put it down."--Marie Benedict, New York Times bestselling author of The Mitford Affair

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Central Park birder Christian Cooper takes us beyond the viral video that shocked a nation and into a world of avian adventures, global excursions, and the unexpected lessons you can learn from a life spent looking up.

"Wondrous . . . captivating.”—Ed Yong, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of An Immense World

Christian Cooper is a self-described “Blerd” (Black nerd), an avid comics fan and expert birder who devotes every spring to gazing upon the migratory birds that stop to rest in Central Park, just a subway ride away from where he lives in New York City. While in the park one morning in May 2020, Cooper was engaged in the birdwatching ritual that had been a part of his life since he was ten years old when what might have been a routine encounter with a dog walker exploded age-old racial tensions. Cooper’s viral video of the incident would send shock waves through the nation.

In Better Living Through Birding, Cooper tells the story of his extraordinary life leading up to the now-infamous incident in Central Park and shows how a life spent looking up at the birds prepared him, in the most uncanny of ways, to be a gay, Black man in America today. From sharpened senses that work just as well at a protest as in a park to what a bird like the Common Grackle can teach us about self-acceptance, Better Living Through Birding exults in the pleasures of a life lived in pursuit of the natural world and invites you to discover them yourself.

Equal parts memoir, travelogue, and primer on the art of birding, this is Cooper’s story of learning to claim and defend space for himself and others like him, from his days at Marvel Comics introducing the first gay storylines to vivid and life-changing birding expeditions through Africa, Australia, the Americas, and the Himalayas. Better Living Through Birding recounts Cooper’s journey through the wonderful world of birds and what they can teach us about life, if only we would look and listen.

White lies. Dark humor. Deadly consequences... Bestselling sensation Juniper Song is not who she says she is, she didn't write the book she claims she wrote, and she is most certainly not Asian American--in this chilling and hilariously cutting novel from the #1 New York Times bestselling author R. F. Kuang.

Authors June Hayward and Athena Liu were supposed to be twin rising stars. But Athena's a literary darling. June Hayward is literally nobody. Who wants stories about basic white girls, June thinks.

So when June witnesses Athena's death in a freak accident, she acts on impulse: she steals Athena's just-finished masterpiece, an experimental novel about the unsung contributions of Chinese laborers during World War I.

So what if June edits Athena's novel and sends it to her agent as her own work? So what if she lets her new publisher rebrand her as Juniper Song--complete with an ambiguously ethnic author photo? Doesn't this piece of history deserve to be told, whoever the teller? That's what June claims, and the New York Times bestseller list seems to agree.

But June can't get away from Athena's shadow, and emerging evidence threatens to bring June's (stolen) success down around her. As June races to protect her secret, she discovers exactly how far she will go to keep what she thinks she deserves.

With its totally immersive first-person voice, Yellowface grapples with questions of diversity, racism, and cultural appropriation, as well as the terrifying alienation of social media. R.F. Kuang's novel is timely, razor-sharp, and eminently readable.

From the star of The Book of Mormon and Girls, candid, hilarious essays on anxiety, ambition, and the uncertain path to adulthood that ask: How will we know when we get there?
 
“With the unsparing eye of David Sedaris and the social wisdom of Nora Ephron, Andrew Rannells tackles the most foundational questions of growing up.”—Lena Dunham

In Uncle of the Year, Andrew Rannells wonders: If he, now in his forties, has everything he’s supposed to need to be an adult—a career, property, a well-tailored suit—why does he still feel like an anxious twenty-year-old climbing his way toward solid ground? Is it because he hasn’t won a Tony, or found a husband, or had a child? And what if he doesn’t want those things? (A husband and a child, that is. He wants a Tony.)
 
In deeply personal essays drawn from his life as well as his career on Broadway and in Hollywood, Rannells argues that we all pretend—for friends, partners, parents, and others—that we are constantly succeeding in the process known as “adulting.” But if this acting is leaving us unfulfilled, then we need new markers of time, new milestones, new expectations of what adulthood is and can be.
 
Along the way, Rannells navigates dating, aging, mental health, bad jobs, and much more. In his essay “Uncle of the Year,” he explores the role that children play in his life, as a man who never thought having kids was necessary or even possible—until his siblings have kids and he falls in love with a man with two of his own. In “Always Sit Next to Mark Ruffalo,” he reveals the thrills and absurdities of the awards circuit, and the desire to be recognized for one’s work. And in “Horses, Not Zebras,” he shares the piece of wisdom that helped him finally come to terms with his anxiety and perfectionism.
 
Filled with honest insights and a sharp wit, Uncle of the Year challenges us to take a long look at who we’re pretending to be, who we know we are, and who we want to become.

A delightfully funny and steamy debut novel about music, fate, redemption, and love from beloved songwriter and Bangles co-founder Susanna Hoffs that is "part British romcom, part Jane Eyre, and one hundred percent enjoyable" (Tom Perrotta).

"A total knockout . . . The smart, ferocious rock-star redemption romance you didn't know you needed." --New York Times Book Review

Jane Start is thirty-three, broke, and recently single. Ten years prior, she had a hit song--written by world-famous superstar Jonesy--but Jane hasn't had a breakout since. Now she's living out of four garbage bags at her parents' house, reduced to performing to Karaoke tracks in Las Vegas. Rock bottom.

But when her longtime manager Pippa sends Jane to London to regroup, she's seated next to an intriguing stranger on the flight--the other Tom Hardy, an elegantly handsome Oxford professor of literature. Jane is instantly smitten by Tom, and soon, truly inspired. But it's not Jane's past alone that haunts her second chance at stardom, and at love. Is Tom all that he seems? And can Jane emerge from the shadow of Jonesy's earlier hit, and into the light of her own?

In turns deeply sexy, riotously funny, and utterly joyful, This Bird Has Flown explores love, passion, and the ghosts of our past, and offers a glimpse inside the music business that could only come from beloved songwriter Susanna Hoffs.

"In this sexy, page-turning treat, Susanna Hoffs writes as engagingly as she sings." --Helen Fielding, author of the bestselling sensation Bridget Jones's Diary

"A little bit romance, a little bit rock-and-roll--this isn't just a book, it's a love song."―Christina Lauren, New York Times bestselling author of The Unhoneymooners

"Satisfied the part of me that loves a hot rock-and-roll romance as well as the part that loves a tender love story . . . such a fun read." --Jasmine Guillory, New York Times bestselling author of Drunk on Love

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A simple, stylish cookbook full of desserts that come together faster than you can eat them—from the author of Dining In and Nothing Fancy.

“Filled with no-fuss recipes perfect for quick and easy baking projects . . . blissfully effortless.”—People
 
ONE OF THE MOST ANTICIPATED COOKBOOKS OF 2023: People, HuffPost, Delish, Tasting Table
 
Casual, effortless, chic: These are not words you’d use to describe most desserts. But before Alison Roman made recipes so perfect that they go by one name—The Cookie, The Pasta, The Lemon Cake—she was a restaurant pastry chef who spent most of her time learning to make things the hard way. She studied flavor, technique, and precision, then distilled her knowledge to pare it all down to create dessert recipes that feel special and approachable, impressive and doable. In Sweet Enough, Alison has written the book for people who think they don’t have the time or skill to pull off dessert. Here, the desserts you want to make right away, you can make right away. 

Alison shows you how to make simple yet sublime sweets with her trademark casualness, like how to make jam in the oven, then turn that jam into a dessert—swirled into ice cream or folded into easy one-bowl cake batter. (Opening a jar of jam is more than fine, too.) She waxes poetic on the virtues of frozen fruit and teaches you the best way to throw your own Sundae Party. There are effortless cakes that take just minutes to get into a pan. And there are new, instant classics with a signature Alison twist, like Salted Lemon Pie, Raspberries and Sour Cream, Toasted Rice Pudding, or a Caramelized Maple Tart. Requiring little more than your own two hands and a few mixing bowls, the recipes are geared towards those without fancy equipment or specialty ingredients.

Whether you’re a dedicated baker or, better yet, someone who doesn’t think they are a baker, Sweet Enough lets you finish any dinner, any party, or any car ride to a dinner party with a little something wonderful and sweet.