From each of the ten essays emerges a simple, punchy maxim (‘Be the hero of your own life’; ‘Question authority’; ‘Change your mind’). Yet from these simple starting points wonderful, wise, and accessible essays unfold, taking the reader from Austen to Auden, Baudelaire to Brecht, to answer the question: what does literature teach us about what it means to be human? Ben Hutchinson extrapolates the universal truths that echo time and time again in literature, and offers a toolkit to his reader to reflect on and learn from the books they read and return to.