If you were to be disassembled, you would be truly enormous. If someone were to straighten and stretch your lungs, they would cover a tennis court, and the airways within them would reach from London to Moscow. The length of all your blood vessels would wrap around the Earth two and a half times. The most remarkable piece of all this is your DNA. You have a meter of it crammed inside every cell, and you have so many cells that if you made all the DNA in your body into a single thin thread, its length would be ten billion miles, reaching beyond Pluto.

Think about it: there is enough material in your body to reach beyond the solar system. You belong to the universe in the most literal sense of the word. Absolutely accessible and remarkably addictive, the book you hold in your hands is the most comprehensive manual to understand the body you inhabit – how it works, how it self-heals, and how it can "break down". Written with disarming humor and unmatched intelligence by the greatest contemporary science communicator, The Body will captivate you with the incredible scientific facts you will learn (your body produced a million red blood cells while you were reading this text) and will help you perceive deeper the miracle of life in general, and of yourself in particular.

We live our lives within this warm mass of flesh and yet consider it completely taken for granted, writes Bryson. The Body will cure this indifference of yours with generous doses of astonishing information and irresistibly entertaining stories from the history of science.

WHAT THEY SAY ABOUT THE BOOK

Delightful… Bryson is excellent at calming our fears and debunking widespread myths. New York Times Book Review

Having studied article after article, having discussed with hundreds of doctors and biologists, and having read a library of books, Bryson, who seems to have thoroughly enjoyed the process, offers us a list of wonders, a journey into the realm that human eyes cannot comprehend. Cheerful prose that sweeps you along, well-tuned narrative interspersed with humor, unknown details, and biographical digressions… that culminates in the ultimate recipe for a better life: eat a little less, exercise a little more. Guardian