Fearne Cotton and Mark Watson offer their advice in best new PAPERBACKS of January:

Mortification by Mark Watson (Phoenix £10.99, 352pp)

For a comedian, dying on stage is an ever-present dread and Mark Watson has experienced it in ways that are painful (and painfully funny) to recall.

In his latest book he revisits eight occasions when he endured a mortifying failure. ‘Mortifications,’ he writes, ‘are only as important as we allow them to be’.

Great advice – but even now, he admits that he constantly disregards it.

Some of his mortifications are greater than others but all are wince-making, from his choirboy failure to hit a high note at a Christmas carol service to being invalided off a remote island where a survival show was being filmed.

But hidden within these mortifications was a hard-won revelation: life isn’t about victory or failure, it’s more like a piece of music to which we dance as best we can.

Little Things by Fearne Cotton (Vermilion £10.99, 352pp)

When it comes to stress, broadcaster and mental health advocate Fearne Cotton has recently had more than her fair share.

Last December, she announced the end of her ten-year marriage to Jesse Wood, son of Rolling Stones guitarist Ronnie Wood, and revealed that she was undergoing surgery for two benign tumours on her jaw.

In Little Things, her toolkit of strategies for dealing with stress, she suggests we have more control over our response to feeling overwhelmed than we might think.

The pressures of modern life are relentless, but Little Things breaks them down into manageable categories, such as health, relationships and change.

With anecdotes, questionnaires and a list of practical suggestions, this is a wise and compassionate guide to a calmer, happier frame of mind.

 Little Englanders by Alwyn Turner (Profile Books £11.99, 400pp)

On January 22, 1901, Queen Victoria died. The new monarch, Edward VII, was a stout, pleasure-loving character with a fondness for fast horses and fast women, but the Edwardian age would replace Victorian confidence with uncertainty and social change.

Alwyn Turner’s account of the years between the turn of the century and the First World War draws fascinating parallels with our own era.

Meanwhile, popular songs offered a ribald commentary on everything from the Boer War to the Suffragettes.

Little Englanders is a brilliantly colourful history of an age of anxiety by an author steeped in the fact and fiction of the early 20th century.