‘I feel like there’s a leopard in my house, locked in a room. I’ve contacted the leopard authorities and they assure me they are used to dealing with leopards like this, and they have a plan for removing the leopard. It will take a while, though, and once in a while I can hear it growl.

And that’s all very reassuring. Even so, several times a day I think to myself: “Hang on, there’s a leopard in my house.”’

One morning, while shaving, the comedian Mark Steel noticed that one side of his neck seemed larger than the other. After a whistlestop tour of assorted medical professionals, a consultant delivered the ominous words that would define the next months of his life: ‘I’m afraid it’s not good news, Mr Steel’.

And so began a journey into the heart of the NHS, as he embarked on the long and uncertain road to cancer recovery via a range of mildly torturous and entirely miraculous treatments. What, if anything, might he learn about himself – and our capacity for coping with life when times get tough – as he becomes part of a club that one in two British people will ultimately join?

A frank and funny diary of one man’s rather trying year, this is an unforgettable and uplifting story of getting ill, getting on with it, and getting better.

"There are enough cancer memoirs to fill a small bookshop, with bookcases for all the affected body parts. It can feel churlish to apply critical faculties to this of all subjects, but if there is a high bar for the genre, then it’s one Mark Steel clears like Dick Fosbury on a good day… The ride we accompany him on is inspiring and invariably very funny." - The Guardian

"The challenges of navigating the healthcare system are legion, but as this clear-eyed, humane and engaging book makes repeatedly and abundantly clear, without the NHS’s central tenet – if you are ill, you will be helped – we are completely sunk." - Observer