Jennifer Freed brings a background in psychology to astrology, using the four elements to explore personality and everyday patterns. I like a book that treats a birth chart as a way into knowing yourself, and then trusting what you find.

Thais Gibson's newest book on Integrated Attachment Theory moves past naming your attachment style and into the beliefs and needs underneath it, with a secure way of relating as the goal. It's the book I'd hand anyone who wants to understand the method from the source.

Brianna Wiest's book is about the ways we get in our own way. Her central idea is that sabotaging ourselves usually isn't random. It's often meeting a need, sometimes a very old one, that we haven't found a better way to meet yet.

Five minutes in the morning, five at night. Three things you're grateful for, three things that would make today great, and then a look back before bed at what went well and what could have gone better. It's the one a lot of people start with, maybe because it asks so little of you.

Elizabeth Greenwood set out to find what intuition actually is, and went looking in neuroscience, in psychology and, yes, with psychics. The book takes on the question most of us never ask out loud, which is how to tell a gut feeling apart from anxiety or plain wishful thinking. It's a little witchy, which feels right for October, when every Etsy witch is having the best month of her year.

Sara Jackson is a social worker and the founder of The Practice in Toronto. Her book opens on a feeling plenty of people will recognize. Everything looks fine from the outside, and still a small voice keeps asking whether this is really it.

Stephen Grosz is a psychoanalyst, and Love's Labor draws on stories from his practice to look at how people come to love each other and how they keep it going. After a run of frameworks and exercises, this one just sits with the question of how love lasts.

Lindsay Gibson is a clinical psychologist, and this book is about growing up with parents who struggled to meet their children's emotional needs. What I appreciate is that she's far more interested in understanding than in blame.

Kate Murphy is a journalist, and this book is her argument that most of us are much worse listeners than we think. It's good company for anyone who has ever nodded through a conversation while quietly rehearsing their reply.

Dalgleish looks at how expectations from a spouse's family can create tension inside a marriage, and how couples can work together when family obligations leave one partner feeling unheard. A good one to read while holiday plans are still taking shape.