'Mark Watson is a national treasure' Richard Osman

Whatever I now know about life - or think I know - I found out through failure, disappointment, mortification. I'm writing it all down as much to remind myself as for anyone else - but now you're here, I'd love you to stick around . . .

Mark Watson is generally accepted to be alive. And yet he's died many times. Not just on stage - though he'll tell you about that - but in other ways, too. There's been the death of a childhood dream. The death of his panel-show career. And then there was the time he died inside and nearly lost it all . . .

Eye-opening, revealing and painfully funny, this is a book about mortification, failure and all the times life doesn't work out as planned. But it also wisely questions whether the things we strive for - recognition, success, the approval of others - are really the things that matter. It's a book about death that reminds us how to live.

'Life is full of hurdles, but this hilarious book brilliantly demonstrates that we learn more by hitting them than clearing them' Richard Herring

'Mark Watson makes the base metal of failure into comedy gold' Adam Kay