A Life in Pieces

A darkly comic and moving memoir on what it means to be human in a world where nothing is certain, from the award-winning Oxford professor.

‘A book that will stay with you for life’
NATALIE HAYNES

‘The best book about multiple sclerosis’
THE TIMES

We all have trapdoors in our lives. Sometimes we jump off just in time. But sometimes we are unlucky. My own trapdoor was hidden in the consulting room of an Oxford neurologist.

When the trapdoor opened for Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, he plummeted into a world of MRI scans, a disobedient body and the crushing unpredictability of a multiple sclerosis diagnosis. But, as he explores in Metamorphosis, his fall also did something else. It took him deep into his own mind: his hopes, his fears, his loves and losses, and the books that would sustain, inform and nourish him as his life began to transform in ways he could never have imagined.

‘A pitch-perfect memoir… touchingly honest and darkly funny’
JACQUELINE WILSON

‘An outstanding feat… Riveting’
SUNDAY TIMES