A novelist (Kiss and Tell, 1996, etc.) with a flair for gleaning self-help from across the ages (The Consolations of Philosophy, 2000) cleverly deconstructs and demystifies that sinking feeling of material inferiority. Read full book review >

Having changed lives with the help of a French writer (How Proust Can Change Your Life, 1997), de Botton now seeks to offer those lives needed consolation—and specific advice—with the writings of some of the world's most illustrious philosophers. Read full book review >

For the era of the self-help bestseller, novelist de Botton delivers a witty, entertaining literary appreciation of the author of Remembrance of Things Past. Read full book review >

A young, self-centered British swain vows to get to know the next woman he meets better than she knows herself, in de Botton's self-consciously coy follow-up to On Love (1993) and The Romantic Movement (1995). ``It took me a long time to . . . understand how someone could have been so un-self-aware and at the same time so self-obsessed,'' reads the narrator's most recent Dear John letter. ``You said you loved me, but a narcissist can't love anyone but himself.'' Miffed by the accusation, de Botton's intellectual hero determines not just to pay more attention to the next woman he meets but to immerse himself in her life as assiduously as a biographer studies his subject. Read full book review >

A sometimes diverting, sometimes loquacious and cutesy second novel from de Botton (On Love (1993), who once again combines a twentysomething off-again-on-again relationship with various sorts of mock-serious disquisitions on love and other topics. Read full book review >

A tour-de-force pleasure of a first novel that takes a conventional love story and textures it with philosophical ruminations, ironic subtitles, and various sorts of playfulness, including pencil drawings. Read full book review >