Full of jokes, conundra and startling insights...Eco has both moved with the times and moved his discipline along... Few will come to Kant and the Platypus for a bulletin on the world of literary theory...what the general reader will find here is an extraordinary mind at play

A typical Eco book in its scope and vastness of ambition. In his hands, semiotics is transformed from a specialist branch of learning into a theory of everything...readers will not fail to be stimulated

Eco's sensitivity to the mysteries of signification supplies the irony and perceptiveness of his essays. Here, he addresses the mysteries themselves. He does it in characteristic fashion, with wit and invention; but with serious intent too... Eco deploys all his skills of anecdote and illustration, pleasurably decorating an earnest and complicated matter

Umberto Eco is perhaps the leading contemporary representative of the philosophy of semiotics... The discussion is consistently fertile and provocative and provides a wealth of suggestive anecdotes and illustrations

Compelling... The job of demystifying science is completed with style, jargon-free and elegantly written

Fascinating and engaging

Your One Wild and Precious Life . . . will transform your thinking

It reframed so much for me

The rotund nature of the work makes it feel like a foundational text, accessible to anyone who seeks to know more about themselves and something any trainee psychologist would enjoy. It astutely examines how attachments to people or patterns can speed up, stunt or spark our growth, and, most importantly, what we can do about it.

No matter where you locate yourself in this book there's an energy to the prose that makes it a fascinating read.

But if every love story is a ghost story, as David Foster Wallace says, then Gaffney's new book resurrects your original love story and the ghost that it conjures. She provides instructions on how to vanquish the past and understand connection, so a new cycle of living is possible.

This book is a powerful reminder that history does not have to dictate our future if we can, somehow, amid the chaos of life, listen now and again.

This book is a practical guide to making the most of our lives, within a revised framework, at every stage.

Gaffney invariably gets to the core of things and always seems to talk to one directly. If she has a recipe for facing the next stage in life, it's going to be one worth trying

An expertly organised tour through life