Metamorphosis: A Life in Pieces

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This is a beautifully written memoir- the story of a devastating diagnosis but it is so much more than that. An account of living with multiple sclerosis that is both deeply literary and painfully honest as it charts his journey into ill health. And part of the agenda here, no doubt, is to make readers just a little more aware of MS (which clearly has a history of misrepresentation) - whichever passport they currently hold. An account of its author’s experiences of what was then known as “disseminated sclerosis” – Cummings died the year it came out, aged just 30 – it had a powerful effect on Douglas-Fairhurst, one he describes compellingly in Metamorphosis.

In his lovely, book-lined room in Magdalen College, Oxford – open a window, and you may hear the sound of a deer coughing in the mist – Douglas-Fairhurst, a fiftysomething professor of English whose studies of Lewis Carroll and Charles Dickens have won literary prizes, and who has acted as the historical consultant on, among other productions, the TV series Dickensian and the Enola Holmesfilms, gamely waves an ankle at me. While many patients have had to travel abroad (often to Mexico) to receive this radical treatment, he discovered that AHSCT trials were being conducted in London, for which, following tests, he turned out to be eligible.To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. A darkly comic and moving reflection on what it means to be human in a world where nothing is certain, from the award-winning Oxford professor'The best book about multiple sclerosis'THE TIMES'An outstanding feat'SUNDAY TIMESWe all have trapdoors in our lives. Metamorphosis is the best book I have read about multiple sclerosis, and that is because it is about so much more. it persuasively builds the case for the ability of stories to offer hope and solace; to help us become ourselves, over and over, even in extremis.

His partner, M, set the right example: rather than maunder or end the relationship, he lightened the air with jokes.No one would be able to enter his room without first disinfecting themselves in a decontamination area. Weak, vulnerable and permanently attached to a drip, he would be barrier nursed for a month at least.

But he is kind and practical and generous, and those are the things you need if you’re ill – and my book, in part, is a love letter to him.

And there is mischievous laughter breezing throughout the book, forbidding any maudlin false sentiment. It is accepted by you that Daunt Books has no control over additional charges in relation to customs clearance. Yet, as with everything Douglas-Fairhurst does, it's also beautifully written, with great humanity, and wit (occasionally laugh-out-loud funny), and it doesn't dodge the serious business of being at the mercy of one's own increasingly self-defeating body. Take the neat rhetorical flourish in the zeugma here: ‘University is a place where people try to reinvent themselves. When a trapdoor opened in Robert Douglas-Fairhurst’s life – the abrupt diagnosis, in his 40s, of multiple sclerosis – he couldn’t help thinking of Gregor in Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis, a young man who’s changed into a giant beetle, imprisoned in bed, legs waving feebly in the air.

This is a homage to the healing power of reading as much as to the incredible medical advances of stem cell transplantation. While this book deals with distress, physical pain and uncertainty, its wry humour and lightness of touch make it anything but a misery memoir. M, too, was sanguine about what might lie ahead – Douglas-Fairhurst carefully outlined a series of increasingly grim scenarios, beginning with whether M would be willing to cut his toenails for him – and he was also funny about it, ready to take the piss.What he gives us isn’t just the story of an illness but a story about the importance of stories – of imaginative literature as bibliotherapy. It really is time that there is a concerted effort by the NHS to level up diagnosis, care and the longer-term options. As it turned out, the second scenario was closer to the truth, but at the time it was difficult to be suitably terrified because I simply didn’t know what, exactly, I was scared of. Reading someone like him, who goes through a worse version of what I’m going through, is a form of homeopathy,” he says.