A short note before you begin.

This book has been written for the reader at the threshold — the young person who has begun to suspect that the question of what kind of person to become matters more than the world around them is admitting, and who has not yet found the words for what they are noticing. It is written also for anyone older who recognises that threshold in themselves, whether they reached it years ago and have been making the slow walk that began there, or whether they have arrived at it again, as people sometimes do, at a later season of life.

The book is not a guide. It will not tell you what to think. What it offers is a way of looking — at yourself, at the people who have formed you, at the work you have been doing without registering it as work, at the country that has shaped you and the institutions that are still shaping you now. The looking has a structure. The structure is what the book is for. Once you have it, you will see things in your own life that you have not been seeing, and you will see them in your own life rather than in mine.

The book asks for some hours of your attention. It will repay them. It will also ask you to do the work it is not willing to do for you — to find, in your own kitchen and your own workplace and your own friendships and your own country, the shapes the chapters offer. The cases are yours. The recognitions are yours. The book provides the framework. You provide the life.

If you would prefer to begin, you can download the book now from any of the links above. The rest of this page is for those who want to know more before they read.

What is in the book

A preface, fourteen chapters, and a short epilogue. The chapters are organised in three movements.

Movement One — What We Have Been Given walks through what every reader has inherited before they were old enough to choose, what shape that inheritance has, and the recognition that the reader has been making something of it the whole time.

Movement Two — The Company We Keep turns to the small dense places where the work of becoming a person actually happens: the friendships in which the truth can be told, the work that shapes the worker, the institutions whose protective apparatus can turn against what it was built to defend.

Movement Three — The Wider Country scales the patterns to the country and the world, examines what happens to a people that has lost itself and what recovery has required where it has happened, and closes with the question that a particular story from the last century has been putting to the reader the whole time.

A note on how to read it

Slowly. The chapters are short — four to five thousand words each — and each is meant to be read in one sitting, with some time afterwards before the next is begun. The book has been built to let the reader work alongside it; reading it in long stretches without space for the recognitions to settle will produce less than reading one chapter and putting the book down for an evening. Some readers will want to read it with a friend; the book repays the conversations it produces. Some readers will want to read it more than once; the second reading is often the one in which the framework starts to do its work.

Sharing and translating

This book is offered freely under a Creative Commons licence (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) that permits non-commercial sharing, reproduction, and translation. If you have read the book and think a young person in your life would benefit from reading it, please pass it on — by lending your copy, by sending the download link, by buying them a printed copy. If you teach, and you would like to use the book or parts of it with your students, please do; you do not need to ask. If you would like to translate the book into another language, please do that also; the only requirements are attribution and that the translation be shared under the same licence. If you do translate it, I would be glad to hear from you, both because I would like to know that the translation exists and because I would be happy to link to it from this page so that other readers in the same language can find it.

The licence

This work is licensed under Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International, the same licence that applies to the rest of this website. You may share and adapt the work for non-commercial purposes, with attribution, and under the same licence.

A last word

If you have read the book, and it has been useful to you, the most useful thing you can do with it is hand it to someone else. The book is part of a chain — the chain it describes — and the chain runs through the reader rather than around them.