In this illuminating and absorbing collection of essays, Siri Hustvedt explores many of the themes that preoccupy her novels: identity and memory, sexuality and mortality, psychology, love and the power of imagination. But here she offers her personal experience - as daughter, sister, mother and wife, student, reader and writer - to illustrate fundamental aspects of our lives as individuals and social beings in the modern world. She draws, too, on the work of Henry James, F Scott Fitzgerald and Charles Dickens, probing their insights into human nature.

Wise, honest and luminously intelligent, this is a book that invites us to look afresh at ourselves and the universe we inhabit.