In the original dustsheet. Black cloth binding with silver title on the spine.

• F.B.A. provides an in-depth photographic presentation of this item to stimulate your feeling and touch. More traditional book descriptions are immediately available.

‘This book is about change.’

We are all storytellers – we make stories to make sense of our lives. But it is not enough to tell tales. There must be someone to listen.
In his work as a practising psychoanalyst, Stephen Grosz has spent the last twenty-five years uncovering the hidden feelings behind our most baffling behaviour. The Examined Life distils over 50,000 hours of conversation into pure psychological insight, without the jargon.
This extraordinary book is about one ordinary process: talking, listening and understanding. Its aphoristic and elegant stories teach us a new kind of attentiveness. They also unveil a delicate self-portrait of the analyst at work, and show how lessons learned in the consulting room can reveal as much to him as to the patient. These are stories about our everyday lives: they are about the people we love and the lies that we tell; the changes we bear, and the grief. Ultimately, they show us not only how we lose ourselves but how we might find ourselves too.

Reviews:

• it will leave you wiser about humanity than you were when you picked it up.’ – Andrew Solomon, author of Far From the Tree

• ‘A fascinating collection of quiet stories about very real human predicaments: the listening cure at its best.’ – Patrick McGrath, author of Asylum

• ‘I couldn’t put this down – I read about other people, but learned about myself….No preaching, no clichés―just wisdom.’ – Victoria Hislop, author of The Thread

• ‘There is a rare integrity in the writing: no showing off, just honest attention to each trusted relationship.’ – Ruth Padel, author of 52 Ways of Looking at a Poem

• ‘This gripping book offers psychological solutions to some extremely complex human puzzles and is full of wisdom and insight.’– Sophie Hannah, author of Little Face

Stephen Grosz (born 1952) is a British psychoanalyst and author. Born in Indiana, United States, and educated at the University of California, Berkeley and Balliol College, Oxford, Grosz teaches clinical technique at the Institute of Psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic theory at University College London. He has been Consultant Adult Psychotherapist at the Portman Clinic in London. His writings have appeared in the Financial Times and Granta. His book, The Examined Life, was published by Chatto and Windus (UK) in January 2013, and spent the first three months after publication in the top ten of the Sunday Times non-fiction bestseller list. The Examined Life was published in the United States by W.W. Norton and in Canada by Random House Canada in May 2013. It has been translated into over 25 languages including Danish, Dutch, German, Italian, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish, and will soon be published in Chinese, Hebrew and Japanese.

In The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani praised the book as “an insightful and beautifully written… a series of slim, piercing chapters that read like a combination of Chekhov and Oliver Sacks.”

An abridged version of the book was broadcast on BBC Radio 4. The Examined Life was long-listed for the 2013 Guardian First Book Award.

The Examined Life was chosen as one of 2013’s Books of the Year in: The New York Times (Michiko Kakutani), Sunday Times (James McConnachie), Observer (Lisa Appignanesi), Salon (Emma Brockes), Mail on Sunday (Craig Brown), Observer (Lucy Lethbridge), The British Psychological Society.