From the UK’s foremost literary psychoanalyst, a dazzling new book on the universal urge to change our lives. We live in a world in which we are invited to change – to become our best selves, through politics, or fitness, or diet, or therapy. We change all the time – growing older and older – and how we think about change changes over time too.

We want to think of our lives as progress myths – as narratives of positive personal growth – at the same time as we inevitably age and suffer setbacks. So there are the stories we tell about change, and there are the changes we actually make – and they don’t always go, or come, together . .

. This sparkling book is about that fact.