Cell mates

David Farrier Nature’s Genius Evolution’s lessons for a changing planet 288pp. Canongate. £20. In David Farrier’s latest book, he warns us that humanity is endangering every facet of life on Earth thr

Speak your mind

When my pugnaciously no-nonsense granny set about constructing our family tree, she cut through the ambiguity of my place on it by adding (grafted) after my name. It was a fair, if blunt, acknowledgem

Lucy Inglis BornThe untold history of childbirth336pp. Bloomsbury Continuum. £25. Hannah Marsh ThreadA Caesarean story of myth, magic andmedicine320pp. Leap. £20. Lucy Inglis’s new book Born: The unto

John Blair Killing the Dead Vampire epidemics from Mesopotamia to the New World 536pp. Princeton University Press. £30 (US $35). A dead body, as anyone who has sat with one will know, is an unsettling

Laura Olmsted’s life changed forever in 2018 when she took an AncestryDNA (ancestry. co.uk/dna) test for fun. “To my shock, I discovered that the man who raised me was not my biological father,” says