Introducing Happiness due out in January

I'm very pleased to say that my "practical guide" to happiness is to be published next January by the lovely Icon Books. And one of the most immediately striking things about the book is that it is very yellow – which is just what you need in the middle of the January darkness (just a glance at the cover, and you will find all traces of Seasonal Affective Disorder fading away…)

It's not just a pretty face, though. The book is a pretty brisk and breezy exploration of practical philosophies of happiness, and has been an enormous amount of fun to write. It is practical not in the sense that it tells you how to be happy, or provides you with the One Great Secret of Happiness, but in the sense that it serves up a whole load of ancient philosophy – from Zhuangzi to Epicurus, from the Stoics to Buddhism, and from the pleasingly disreputable Cynics to the uprightness of Confucius – along with good dollops of more recent research, to propose a number of experiments in living that you can put into practice.

My main contentions in the book are these: firstly that happiness is not one but many things; and secondly that there are many other things that are not happiness that also matter. And so there is no One Great Secret (don't believe anybody who tells you that there is); and even if there was, we'd need to balance concerns with happiness against concerns with other things.

If you want to pre-order the book, then you can do so by clicking here. The publication date is 5th January 2012, or thereabouts.