‘Mary Roach offers a fascinating tour of the wonderful world of regenerative medicine.’  TIME, The Most Anticipated Books of Fall 2025

Our bodies regenerate at a remarkable rate – our skin replaces itself every month, our blood every four. You can remove ninety per cent of a liver and it’ll still grow back to its original size (please do not try this at home).

Others – the brain, the heart, the eyes – are more complicated. These stay with us for life. So what do we do when they break down? For centuries, medicine has searched for answers – sculpting noses from brass, borrowing skin from frogs and hearts from pigs and crafting eye parts from jet canopies. And as technology has grown ever more ingenious, so have our solutions.

In Replaceable You, Mary Roach sets sail on the uncharted waters of regenerative medicine, exploring the remarkable advances and difficult questions prompted by the human body’s failings:

• When and how does a person decide they’d be better off with a prosthetic than their existing limb?

• Is there a sensitive way to harvest tissue and bones from the deceased?

• Which animals might be the best organ donors?

Through interviews with patients, physicians, pathologists, engineers and scientists, Roach immerses readers in the wondrous, improbable and surreal quest to build a new you.

‘Addictively readable… Don’t miss it.’ Deborah Blum, author of  The Poisoner’s Handbook

‘Delightful’ Ed Yong

What’s to be done about a drunken elephant? A monkey caught mugging passers-by? A trespassing squirrel?

Follow Mary Roach as she investigates laser scarecrows, robo-hawks, human-elephant conflict specialists and monkey impersonators. Travel to the bear-busy back alleys of Aspen, the gull-vandalized floral displays at the Vatican and leopard-terrorized hamlets in the Himalayas. In this fresh, funny and thoroughly researched book, dive into the weird and wonderful moments when humanity and wildlife bump up against one another.

What’s to be done about a drunken elephant? A monkey caught mugging passersby? A trespassing squirrel?

We’ve never been good at sharing the planet? In the past, when wild animals ‘broke the law’, they might be given lawyers and put on trial. But now, what’s the solution when nature gets in our way? In this fresh, funny and thoroughly researched book, dive into the weird and wonderful moments when humanity and wildlife bump up against one another.

Follow Mary Roach as she explores laser scarecrows, robo-hawks, human-elephant conflict specialists and monkey impersonators. Travel to the bear-busy back alleys of Aspen, the gull-vandalized floral displays at the Vatican and leopard-terrorized hamlets in the Himalayas, and discover hope for compassionate coexistence.