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A unique insight into life behind bars, inherited trauma and some of life's most pressing questions.

About the Author

Andy West has written for The Guardian, Aeon, 3:AM Magazine, Huck, The Big Issue, openDemocracy, Lead, The Times Education Supplement and Bloomsbury. The Life Inside is his first book.

Reviews

Andy West’s tense and intimate book is an education . . . The Life Inside deserves the widest possible readership.
*Geoff Dyer*

By turns enriching, sobering and at times, heartrending. A tale centering on our inner critic or executioner and how to stifle its constant sniping. A wonder.
*Sir Lenny Henry*

An authentic, fascinating and deeply moving story about the different ways people search for freedom.
*Terry Waite*

Written with sensitivity and humanity... a remarkable insight into prison life
*Amanda Brown, author of The Prison Doctor*

West powerfully interweaves an account of teaching philosophy in prison with his own family’s history of imprisonment, creating an intellectually thrilling memoir of freedom and constraint.
*Alex Marzano-Lesnevich, author of The Fact of a Body*

Weaving philosophical questions about free will, forgiveness, guilt and shame, with family history and the realities of incarceration. Beautifully written – honest, painful, absurd and sometimes joyful.
*Caitlin Davies, author of Queens of the Underworld*

A book that every thinking person should read.
*Simon Critchley, author of Continental Philosophy*

Written with compassion and searing honesty.
*The Tablet*

The Life Inside is an honest, delicate memoir that doubles as an accessible handbook of philosophical ideas. It expands both heart and mind; I’ll never think about prisons - let alone my own freedom and family - the same way again.
*Ciaran Thapar, author of Cut Short*

It’s a rare feat for anyone who works in a prison to capture the smell, the flavour and the taste of the fetid air they share with the prisoners in a book . . . More and more compelling with every turn of the page.
*Erwin James, author of Redeemable*

These are tender, complicated relationships, and there is candour and wisdom - and no little courage - in how West shows them to us.
*The New Humanist*

West incorporates philosophical, descriptive, and psychological elements as with a fine Dickensian brush he paints a picture of the gritty details of prison life... profoundly moving.
*Philosophy Now*

Insightful and sophisticated.
*TLS*

An astonishing, necessary book . . . brilliantly dispels damaging myths about those whose lives are lived inside.
*Lucia Osborne-Crowley*

Immersing, entertaining and wonderfully empathetic.
*The Bookseller*

Drawn with great tenderness.
*Prospect*

One of the best books I've read this year. Moving, witty and profound, it's a powerfully humane book about a part of life that's defined by inhumanity.
*Matt Rowland Hill*

Poignant, insightful, and full of philosophical substance.
*The Philosophers' Magazine*

The Life Inside is extraordinary.
*Rob Doyle*