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  • Published: 16 March 2023
  • ISBN: 9781529199826
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 272

Metamorphosis

A Life in Pieces





For readers of Atul Gawande's Being Mortal and Henry Marsh's Do No Harm, an unforgettably powerful and heartbreaking book about how to live

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

  • Published: 16 March 2023
  • ISBN: 9781529199826
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 272

Other books in the series

About the author

Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka (1883–1924) was born into a Jewish family in Prague. In 1906 he received a doctorate in jurisprudence, and for many years he worked a tedious job as a civil service lawyer investigating claims at the State Worker's Accident Insurance Institute. He never married, and published only a few slim volumes of stories during his lifetime. Meditation, a collection of sketches, appeared in 1912; The Stoker: A Fragment in 1913; Metamorphosis in 1915; The Judgement in 1916; In the Penal Colony in 1919; and A Country Doctor in 1920. The great novels were not published until after his death from tuberculosis: America, The Trial and The Castle.

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