A Shed Of One's Own: Midlife Without the Crisis [Paperback]

`A Shed of One's Own is warm, funny and wise, the antidote to Jeremy Clarkson, the Daily Mail, Grumpy Old Men and the other tools of the rage industry that stoke anger and pomposity in the middle aged . . . A sort of "Zen and the Art of Midlife Management".' --Mark Wilson, Independent on Sunday

'In A Shed of One's Own, [Markus Berkmann] treats all the familiar humilations, collapses and subterfuges of late middle age in a ruefully humorous style' --David Sexton, Evening Standard

* A hilarious book about male midlife, from the inimitable humour of Marcus Berkmann

For many men, middle age arrives too fast and without due warning. One day you are young, free and single; the next you are bald, fat and washed-up, with weird tendrils of hair growing out of your ears. None of it seems fair. With age should come dignity and respect, but instead everyone makes tired jokes about buying a motorbike. Marcus Berkmann isn't having it. Having marked his fiftieth birthday by hiding under the duvet for six weeks, the author of the cricket classics Rain Men and Zimmer Men is now determined to find some light in the all-consuming darkness. Musing over birth, death and all the messy stuff in between, he concludes that however dreadful you look in the mirror today, it will be much worse in ten years' time. His brutally candid despatch from the frontline is not for the faint-hearted, which is to say anyone under thirty-five.

Marcus Berkmann writes for the DAILY MAIL and a monthly pop music column for the SPECTATOR, and has written columns on sport for the INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY and PUNCH.