In early 2019, Rick Morton, author of the critically acclaimed and bestselling memoir One Hundred Years of Dirt, was diagnosed with complex post-traumatic stress disorder - which, as he says, is just a fancy way of saying that one of the people who should have loved him the most during childhood didn’t.

So Rick decided it was time to rediscover love. To get better. Not cured, not fixed. Just … better. This is a book about his journey to betterness, his experiment in living vulnerably.

In fact, it’s a book about love. What love is, what forms it takes, how we practise it in our lives, what it means to us, and how we really, really can’t live without it, even if, like Rick for many years, we think we can. As he says: ‘People think they want cars, and they do, to get to jobs and appointments in cities and regions where public transport has failed them. But what gets them into those cars, out of the house, out of bed for God’s sake, is love.