Kate Summerscale

Kate Summerscale is the author of the number one bestselling The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction 2008, winner of the Galaxy British Book of the Year Award, a Richard & Judy Book Club pick and adapted into a major ITV drama.

Her debut, The Queen of Whale Cay, won a Somerset Maugham award and was shortlisted for The Whitbread Biography Award, and her latest book, The Haunting of Alma Fielding, was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction.

She joins us in the bookshop for her newest book, a captivating A-Z compendium of phobias and manias....

Do you recoil in arachnophobic horror at the sight of a spider - or twitch with nomophobia when you misplace your mobile phone?

Do your book-buying habits verge on bibliomania? Perhaps you find yourself mired in indecision and uncertainty? (Would it be reassuring to give this a name: aboulomania?)

Our phobias and manias are contradictory and multiple: deeply intimate, yet forged by the times we live in - the commonest form of anxiety disorder, but rarely given a formal diagnosis.

Plunge into this rich, surprising and fascinating A-Z compendium to discover how our fixations have taken shape, from pre-history to the present day, as award-winning author Kate Summerscale deftly traces the threads between the past and present, the psychological and social, the personal and the political.

"I am sure this book will cause a 'mania' of its own. Thought-provoking and such fun" ~ Ian Mortimer, bestselling author of The Time Traveller's Guides