Sooner or later, a series of questions arise in our lives that are not easy to answer. How can we reconcile ourselves with the lives we have not been able to live, with the paths we did not take, with the nostalgia for the past? How to accept our failures, the futility of the tasks that consume our present or our own mortality? Most people begin to ask themselves these questions when they have more or less reached the middle of their lives, when youth is still close by but they can already see death at the end of the journey.

In this brilliant book, halfway between a philosophical essay and a self-help book, Kieran Setiya – professor of philosophy at MIT – faces the challenges of adult life and maturity and offers us a walk – from Aristotle to Schopenhauer, from Virginia Woolf to Simone de Beauvoir – for different philosophical and literary works that help us understand what the midlife crisis is and how we can deal with it. A book that, in reality, as its author says, "is not only for those in middle age, but for anyone who is dealing with the irreversibility of time."