Alain de Botton Books In Order

Novels

  1. Essays in Love (1993)
  2. The Romantic Movement (1994)
  3. Kiss and Tell (1995)
  4. The Course of Love (2016)

Non fiction

  1. How Proust Can Change Your Life (1997)
  2. The Consolations of Philosophy (2000)
  3. The Art of Travel (2002)
  4. Status Anxiety (2004)
  5. On Seeing and Noticing (2005)
  6. The Architecture of Happiness (2006)
  7. The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work (2009)
  8. A Week at the Airport (2009)
  9. Religion for Atheists (2012)
  10. How To Think More About Sex (2012)
  11. Art as Therapy (2013)
  12. The News (2014)
  13. A Life More Noble (2015)
  14. Do Humankind’s Best Days Lie Ahead? (2016)
  15. Art Is Therapy (2016)
  16. How to Take Your Time (2017)
  17. The School of Life (2019)

Novels Book Covers

Non fiction Book Covers

Alain de Botton Books Overview

Essays in Love

The bestselling author of The Architecture of Happiness and How Proust Can Change Your Life revisits his utterly charming debut book, Essays in Love.

The narrator is smitten by Chloe on a Paris to London flight, and by the time they ve reached the luggage carousel he knows he is in love. He loves her chestnut hair, watery green eyes, the gap that makes her teeth Kantian and not Platonic, and her views on Heidegger’s Being and Time but he hates her taste in shoes. What makes this book extraordinary is the depth with which the emotions involved in the relationship are analysed. Love comes under the philosophical microscope.

Plotting the course of their affair from the initial delirium of infatuation to the depths of suicidal despair, through a fit of anhedonia defined in medical texts as a disease resulting from the terror brought on by the threat of utter happiness and finally through the terrorist tactics employed when the beloved begins, inexplicably, to drift away, Essays in Love is filled with profound and witty observations on the pain and exhilaration of love. An entire chapter is devoted to the nuances and subtexts of an initial date, while another chapter mulls over the question of how and when to say I love you.

With allusions to Aristotle, Sartre, Wittgenstein, and Groucho Marx, de Botton has plotted an imaginative and microscopically detailed romance.

The Romantic Movement

In The Romantic Movement, Alain de Botton explores the progress of a love affair from first meeting to breaking up, intercut with musings on the nature of art of love. The relationship between Alice, an advertising executive, and Eric, a banker, is examined at every stage, supplemented by quizzes and line drawings by the author and commentary by a chorus of great philosophers, from Descartes to Plato to Aretha Franklin. The Romantic Movement will charm readers and lovers alike with wit, insight, and intelligence.

Kiss and Tell

Dr. Samuel Johnson observed that everyone’s life is a subject worthy of the biographer’s art. Accused by a former girlfriend of being unable to empathize, the narrator of Kiss & Tell takes Johnson’s idea to heart and decides to write about the next person who walks into his life. He meets Isabel Rogers, a production assistant at a small stationery company in London, apparently an ordinary woman. But as the biographer’s understanding of Isabel deepens, she becomes remarkable. Her smallest quirks, private habits, and opinions become worthy of the most painstaking investigation and unexpectedly attractive to her biographer.

How Proust Can Change Your Life

‘What a marvellous book this is…
de Botton dissects what Proust had to say about friendship, reading, looking carefully, paying attention taking your time, being alive and adds his own delicious commentary. The result is an intoxicating as it is wise, amusing as well as stimulating, and presented in so fresh a fashion as to be unique…
I could not stop, and now much start all over again.’ Brian Masters, Mail on Sunday ‘De Botton not only has a complete understanding of Proust’s life…
but what is particularly charming about this small, readable book is its tongue in cheek benignity, its lightly held erudition and its generous way of lending itself to what is not only the greatest book of the century but also the darkest and the most eccentric’ Edmund White, Observer ‘It contains more human interest and play of fancy than most fiction…
de Botton, in emphasizing Proust’s healing, advisory aspects, does us the service of rereading him on our behalf, providing of that vast sacred lake a sweet and lucid distillation.’ John Updike, New Yorker ‘De Botton’s little book is so charming, amusing and sensible that it may even itself change your life.’ Allan Massie, Daily Telegraph ‘This engaging book is one of the most entertaining pieces of literary criticism I have read in a long while.’ Sunday Telegraph ‘A very enjoyable book’ Sebastian Faulks

The Consolations of Philosophy

From the author of How Proust Can Change Your Life, a delightful, truly consoling work that proves that philosophy can be a supreme source of help for our most painful everyday problems. Perhaps only Alain de Botton could uncover practical wisdom in the writings of some of the greatest thinkers of all time. But uncover he does, and the result is an unexpected book of both solace and humor. Dividing his work into six sections each highlighting a different psychic ailment and the appropriate philosopher de Botton offers consolation for unpopularity from Socrates, for not having enough money from Epicurus, for frustration from Seneca, for inadequacy from Montaigne, and for a broken heart from Schopenhauer the darkest of thinkers and yet, paradoxically, the most cheering. Consolation for envy and, of course, the final word on consolation comes from Nietzsche: ‘Not everything which makes us feel better is good for us.’This wonderfully engaging book will, however, make us feel better in a good way, with equal measures of wit and wisdom.

The Art of Travel

Any Baedeker will tell us where we ought to travel, but only Alain de Botton will tell us how and why. With the same intelligence and insouciant charm he brought to How Proust Can Save Your Life, de Botton considers the pleasures of anticipation; the allure of the exotic, and the value of noticing everything from a seascape in Barbados to the takeoffs at Heathrow. Even as de Botton takes the reader along on his own peregrinations, he also cites such distinguished fellow travelers as Baudelaire, Wordsworth, Van Gogh, the biologist Alexander von Humboldt, and the 18th century eccentric Xavier de Maistre, who catalogued the wonders of his bedroom. The Art of Travel is a wise and utterly original book. Don t leave home without it.

Status Anxiety

Every adult life could be said to be defined by two great love stories. The first the story of our quest for sexual love is well known and well charted…
. The second the story of our quest for love from the world is a more secret and shameful tale. And yet this second love story is no less intense than the first. This is a book about an almost universal anxiety that rarely gets mentioned directly: an anxiety about what others think of us, about whether we re judged a success or a failure, a winner or a loser. This is a book about Status Anxiety. Alain de Botton, best selling author of The Consolations of Philosophy and The Art of Travel, asks with lucidity and charm where our worries about status come from and what, if anything, we can do to surmount them. With the help of philosophers, artists and writers, he examines the origins of Status Anxiety ranging from the consequences of the French Revolution to our secret dismay at the success of our friends before revealing ingenious ways in which people have been able to overcome their worries in the search for happiness. We learn about sandal less philosophers and topless bohemians, about the benefits of putting skulls on our sideboards, and about looking at ancient ruins. The result is a book that isn t just highly entertaining and thought provoking, but that is genuinely wise and helpful, too.

The Architecture of Happiness

Bestselling author Alain de Botton considers how our private homes and public edifices influence how we feel, and how we could build dwellings in which we would stand a better chance of happiness. In this witty, erudite look at how we shape, and are shaped by, our surroundings, Alain de Botton applies Stendhal’s motto that Beauty is the promise of happiness to the spaces we inhabit daily. Why should we pay attention to what architecture has to say to us? de Botton asks provocatively. With his trademark lucidity and humour, de Botton traces how human needs and desires have been served by styles of architecture, from stately Classical to minimalist Modern, arguing that the stylistic choices of a society can represent both its cherished ideals and the qualities it desperately lacks. On an individual level, de Botton has deep sympathy for our need to see our selves reflected in our surroundings; he demonstrates with great wisdom how buildings just like friends can serve as guardians of our identity. Worrying about the shape of our sofa or the colour of our walls might seem self indulgent, but de Botton considers the hopes and fears we have for our homes at a new level of depth and insight. When shopping for furniture or remodelling the kitchen, we don t just consider functionality but also the major questions of aesthetics and the philosophy of art: What is beauty? Can beautiful surroundings make us good? Can beauty bring happiness? The buildings we find beautiful, de Botton concludes, are those that represent our ideas of a meaningful life. The Architecture of Happiness marks a return to what Alain does best taking on a subject whose allure is at once tantalizing and a little forbidding and offering to readers a completely beguiling and original exploration of the subject. As he did with Proust, philosophy, and travel, now he does with architecture. From the Hardcover edition.

The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work

From the international bestselling author of The Architecture of Happiness and How Proust Can Change Your Life comes this lyrical, erudite look at our world of work.

We spend most of our time at work, but what we do there rarely gets discussed in the sort of lyrical and descriptive prose our efforts surely deserve. Determined to correct this lapse, armed with a poetic perspective and his trademark philosophical sharpness, Alain de Botton heads out into the world of offices and factories, ready to take in the beauty, interest, and sheer strangeness of the modern workplace.

De Botton spends time in and around some less familiar work environments, including warehouses, container ports, rocket launch pads, and power stations, and follows scientists, landscape painters, accountants, cookie manufacturers, therapists, entrepreneurs, and aircraft salesmen as they do their jobs.

Along the way, de Botton tries to answer some of the most urgent questions we can pose about work: Why do we do it? What makes it pleasurable? What is its meaning? To what end do we daily exhaust not only ourselves but also our planet?

Equally intrigued by work’s pleasures and its pains, Alain de Botton offers a characteristically lucid and witty tour of the working day and night, in a book sure to inspire a range of life changing and wise thoughts.

A Week at the Airport

In the summer of 2009, Alain de Botton will be invited by the owners of Heathrow airport to become their first ever Writer in Residence. He will be installed in the middle of Terminal 5 on a raised platform with a laptop connected to screens, enabling passengers to see what he is writing and to come and share their stories. He will meet travellers from around the world, and will be given unprecedented access to wander the airport and speak with everyone from window cleaners and baggage handlers to air traffic controllers and cabin crew. Working with the renowned documentary photographer Richard Baker, de Botton will produce an extraordinary meditation upon the nature of place, time, and our daily lives. He will explore the magical and the mundane, personal and collective experiences and the interactions of travellers and workers all over this familiar but mysterious site. Like all airports, Heathrow the 15th century village of Heath Row lies beneath the short stay car park is a ‘non place’ that we by definition want to leave, but it also provides a window into many worlds through the thousands of people it dispatches every day. ‘A Week at the Airport‘ is sure to delight de Botton’s large following, and anyone interested in the stories behind the way we live.

Religion for Atheists

From the author of The Consolations of Philosophy, a deeply provocative and useful argument about how we can benefit from the wisdom and power of religion without having to believe in any of it. What if religions aren t either all true or all nonsense?The sterile debate between fundamentalist believers and non believers is finally advanced by Alain de Botton’s astonishing new book, which boldly argues that the supernatural claims of religion are of course entirely false and yet religion still has some very important things to teach the secular world. Religion for Atheists suggests that atheists shouldn t trash religion, they should steal from it because the world s religions are packed with good ideas on how we should live in and arrange our societies. In a highly original and readable tone that blends deep respect with total impiety, de Botton a non believer himself proposes that we should look to religions for insights on, among other topics, how to: build a sense of community, make our relationships last, dampen feelings of envy and inadequacy, escape the 24 hour media world, go traveling, get more out of art, and build new businesses geared around our emotional needs. For too long non believers have faced a stark choice between either swallowing lots of peculiar doctrines or doing away with a range of consoling and beautiful rituals and ideas. At last, Alain de Botton, the author of the bestselling The Consolations of Philosophy and How Proust Can Change Your Life, has produced a far more interesting and truly helpful alternative.

Related Authors

Leave a Comment