The Thing About Life is that one day you'll be dead

And if you think the title is cheery, you'll love chapter headings like 'Everything I Know, I've Learned From My Bad Back' and 'Our Birth is Nothing but Our Death Begun'. No, this is not a book to read if you want to stroll through life blissfully unaware of your own mortality. I read the first couple of chapters just before bed one night and became so lucidly conscious of my own degrading heartbeat that I didn't get a wink of sleep. But then again, I'm a light sleeper. But then again, that's only going to get worse as I get older.

This is a very strange, very interesting little book that simultaneously occupies a number of genres - biography, memoir, autobiography, popular science, Death Manual - and none at the same time. Shields draws together his own experiences, his observations of his ageing father, the wisdom of great thinkers, and the bulging research of medical science to trace a narrative of life, from painful birth, through the extraordinary vigour and potential of youth, through slow, long years of decline to the ultimate destination - the 'D' word.  

It's both witty and extraordinarily stark, smart and poignant. An account of how human we are, how individual, how restricted, how potent, how useful, how strong and how pointless. And by the time you get to the end of the book, there's a certain comfort to take from having confronted and considered with open eyes the path that lies ahead.