As a child, Andrew had a reading disability; now he is a psychoanalyst, and professionally adept in the art of conversation. Not Drowning, Reading is a work of literary non - fiction - a memoir about the art and the gift of reading: As a young child I couldn't read or write. That was something I knew about myself. If you'd have asked me, at the time, some question skilfully designed to elicit the child's sense of identity, it would have been there, resting just below the surface ... In adolescence I read as if my life depended on it, and I think it did. Now increasingly I read for enjoyment rather than survival. Relph's essays reveals a life via the books the author has encountered, and show how one might map a life through reading. From Amis to Bellow, Blake to Herzog, and Shakespeare to Woolf, these essays ask why it is that books are so important to us, and why our relationships with authors and characters can be as vital as any we form in 'real life'.