Profile Books

The compelling concept of transformation is both ancient (Ovid's Metamorphoses) and topical. Gavin Francis follows the phenomenal international success of Adventures in Human Being with Shapeshifters, a book about medicine and human change which could not be more timely in this transgender age. Mixing case studies with observations about history, art, literature, myth and magic, the book covers inevitable body changes, such as puberty, and self-imposed changes, such as cosmetic surgery and tattooing.

Susie Orbach's In Therapy: The Unfolding Story, based on a very popular BBC radio series, explores the process of therapy through dramatised case studies. It reveals as much about what is going on in the mind of the person behind the couch as it does the emotional dilemmas of the clients. Susie Orbach's other books include the groundbreaking Fat is a Feminist Issue, What Do Women Want and Bodies. It is not for nothing that The New York Times referred to her as "Probably the most famous psychotherapist to have set up couch in Britain since Freud." She discusses what happens in therapy with Francesca Segal, author of The Awkward Age, a novel about contemporary family disruption.

Mary Shelley was brought up by her father in a house filled with radical thinkers, poets, philosophers and writers of the day. Aged 16, she eloped with Percy Bysshe Shelley, embarking on a relationship that was lived on the move across Britain and Europe, as she coped with debt, infidelity and the deaths of three children, before early widowhood changed her life for ever. Most astonishingly, it was while she was still a teenager that Mary composed her canonical novel Frankenstein, which was published exactly 200 years ago. In this fascinating dialogue with the past, Sampson sifts through letters, diaries and records to find the real woman behind the story. Published for the 200th anniversary of the publication of Frankenstein, this is a major new work of biography by the prize-winning writer and poet Fiona Sampson.