As the contestants prepare to enter the Big Brother house, Waterstone's suggests ten essential books to survival in the coming weeks.

1) How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. For those who want to take softly-softly approach to getting along with the housemates and winning the public's vote, this tried and tested self-help book is still going strong almost seventy years after it was published.

2) And for those who want to get even closer to their housemates, The Flirt Coach will be the ultimate guide.

3) Machiavelli's The Prince for all the potential Nasty Nicks. Machiavelli, the arch-schemer and master manipulator, argues that any means can be used to get what you want.

4) Sophie Grigson's Feasts for a Fiver, demonstrating that, with a little ingenuity, it is possible to cook wonderful meals for very little money.

5) Passing Time In The Loo edited by Stevens W. Anderson hundreds of pages of trivia, biographies of famous people, summaries of classic novels and quotations. The perfect book for spending time in the one room in the house where the housemates can hope to avoid being broadcast to the world.

6) Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus by John Gray to help the boys and the girls understand each other while completing their team tasks.

7) Don't Take It Personally! - The Art of Dealing with Rejection - essential reading for all but one of the housemates.

8) George Orwell's 1984 for those who want to know more about the original Big Brother.

9) Geri Halliwell's If Only. The ultimate guide for the budding celebrities.

10) And finally - Big Brother: The Unseen Story - the housemates can learn from what really went on behind those closed doors.

Susan Limb from Waterstone's comments: "At Waterstone's we think there are books to suit every situation. The Big Brother housemates are going to need all the help they can get to survive the coming weeks and these books will help them get along together and deal with the challenges inside the Big Brother house and even after it - whether they are the winner or the first to be ejected."