‘Powerful and well-researched. The Lost Girls of Autism shines a much-needed spotlight on a critical issue’ – Dr Maureen Dunne, author of The Neurodiversity Edge

The history of autism is male. It is time for women and girls to enter the spotlight.

When autistic girls meet clinicians, they are often misdiagnosed with anxiety, depression, personality disorders – or receive no diagnosis at all. Autism’s ‘male spotlight’ means we are only now starting to redress this profound injustice.

In The Lost Girls of Autism, renowned brain scientist Gina Rippon delves into the emerging science of female autism, asking why it has been systematically ignored for so long. Generations of researchers, convinced autism was a male problem, simply didn’t bother looking for it in women. But it is now becoming increasingly clear that many autistic women and girls do not fit the traditional, male, model of autism. Instead, they camouflage and mask, hiding their autistic traits to accommodate a society that shuns them.

Urgent and insightful, this is a searching examination of how sexism has biased our understanding of autism. Informed by the latest research in psychology and neuroscience, The Lost Girls of Autism is a clarion call for society to recognize the full spectrum of autistic experience.

What is language?
Why do we have it?
Why does that matter?

Language is perhaps humanity’s most astonishing accomplishment and one that remains poorly understood.

Upending centuries of scholarship (including, most recently, Chomsky and Pinker) The Language Game shows how people learn to talk not by acquiring fixed meanings and rules, but by picking up, reusing, and recombining countless linguistic fragments in novel ways.

Drawing on entertaining and persuasive examples from across the world the book explains:

· How our short-lived memory copes with the on-rushing deluge of sound that is everyday speech.
· Why it is that language is such a challenge for language scientists but learnt effortlessly by toddlers.
· Why the languages of the world are so spectacularly varied—and why no two people speak quite the same language.
· Why humans have language, but chimps don’t.
· How language gave us a big brain and changed the course of evolution.
· How language doesn’t limit, but does shape, how we think.
·And ultimately, why all we know about language should give us hope.

Christiansen and Chater’s The Language Game draws on a fascinating range of examples to show the way language works, has shaped our evolution and is critical to our future.

Sophie Hardach is here to guide us through the strange and wonderful ways that humans have used languages throughout history. She takes us from the earliest Mesopotamian clay tablets and the ‘book cemeteries’ of medieval synagogues to the first sounds a child hears in their mother’s womb and their incredible capacity for language learning. Along the way, Hardach explores the role of trade in transmitting words across cultures and untangles riddles of hieroglyphics, cuneiform and the ancient scripts of Crete and Cyprus. This is a book about languages, the people who love them and the linguistic threads that connect us all.

‘Impeccably researched and engagingly presented… Sophie Hardach tells wonderful stories about words that have travelled vast distances in space and time to make English what it is’ David Bellos, author of Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything

Setting out to conquer the language he loves (but which, amusingly, does not seem to love him back), Alexander devotes himself to learning French, going beyond grammar lessons and memory techniques to delve into the history of the language, the science of linguistics, and the art of translation. Along the way, during his travels in France or following his passion at home, he discovers that not learning a language may be its own reward.