Shapeshifters

Gavin Francis has worked across four continents as a surgeon, emergency physician, medical officer with the British Antarctic Survey and latterly as a GP. He's the author of the Sunday Times bestseller Adventures in Human Being, which was a BMA Book of the Year, and Shapeshifters. His books have won the SMIT Scottish Book of the Year Award, the Saltire Award for Non-Fiction and been shortlisted for the Ondaatje and Costa Prizes. He also writes for the Guardian, The Times, the London Review of Books and Granta. He lives in Edinburgh with his wife and children.

'Stylish and exhilarating... from a wide-ranging mind and a profound humanity... inspiring' Hilary Mantel

'A wonderful series of meditations - clinical, anthropological, literary and deeply humane - on his patients and their illnesses.' Henry Marsh

Timely, thought-provoking and eloquent, brimming both with warmth and insight, he puts himself among the ranks of ... Oliver Sacks and Atul Gawande.' The Times

Unreliable bodies and shifting symptoms are all in a day's work for a GP.

In his years of practising, Gavin Francis has seen it all: the promising law student trapped under the spell of anorexia; the bodybuilder whose use of illegal steroids threatens his fertility; the teenager agonising over the perplexing physical dramas of puberty; and the surprisingly upbeat woman growing a horn in the centre of her forehead.

In Shapeshifters he draws on his patients' bodily transformations, both welcome and unwelcome, bringing together case histories and accounts from the history of medicine, art, literature, myth and magic to show how the very essence of being human is change.

Stories from the GP's waiting room, brought lyrically to life by the bestselling author of Adventures in Human Being