On Purpose: Ten Lessons on the Meaning of Life

Ten essays on how reading and meaningfully engaging with literature can help us live better, more purposeful lives.

How do we live fully?

How do we live successfully?

Adrift in an anchorless world, we often worry about where we are heading. What meaning can we hope to find in our modern, secular life? The answer, Ben Hutchinson explains, can be found by looking to writers and thinkers to help us live more purposefully, more mindfully - more fully.

Interweaving his own (mis-)adventures with those of authors such as T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust and Joan Didion, On Purpose proposes ten ways in which reading and writing encourage us to ask difficult questions, project our minds into the past and future, and see ourselves and others differently.

Engaging, uplifting and aphoristic, this book is for anyone who has lost their sense of direction or wishes to radically transform the way they live.

Ben Hutchinson is an award-winning essayist, critic and professor of European literature. A consultant editor at the Times Literary Supplement, he is the author of seven books, including The Midlife Mind and Comparative Literature: A Very Short Introduction. His writing appears regularly in the national and international press.