The Making of You is the inside story of one of nature’s greatest marvels: the creation of a new human, from first cell to first breath. This is pop science, not a parenting manual, and it almost certainly contains things you didn’t know on almost every page. Did you know that sperm have a sense of smell? That your body has three goes at making kidneys before it gets it right? That the groove on your lip is a seam where the sheets of skin that form your face fused together?

This short book is written in language so simple an intelligent child could read it, but it crams a lot of science into a very small space. It’s not only a wonder-inducing account of our own individual origins; it also finds time to tell the story of how we discovered how pregnancy works, from Aristotle’s experiments on chicken eggs to molecular biology. And it brings you to the cutting edge of research. No matter who you are, your life is an amazing achievement. Join Katharina Vestre to discover how far you’ve come.