Beneath the Skin

Published to accompany BBC Radio 3's A Body of Essays series

Buried beneath layers of flesh, our hearts pump, our lungs inflate, our kidneys filter. These organs, and others, are essential to our survival but remain largely unknown to us. And yet they all have stories to tell.

So who better to tell them than fifteen of the world's finest writers? Working with medical experts, each writer has chosen a different organ: Naomi Alderman unravels the intestines and our obsession with food and digestion; AL Kennedy gets inside the nose and our sense of smell; Philip Kerr traces the development of brain surgery; and Ned Beauman argues that the appendix might not be as useless as we think.

The human stomach, we discover, contains as many brain cells as a cat has in its head. The lungs weigh about the same as a loaf of bread. A traumatic memory can show itself on the skin. Moving, comical and endlessly surprising, Beneath the Skin is an unforgettable voyage through the mysterious landscape of our anatomy.