The Luck percentage

This book is what happened next — a mother’s unfinished dream and a father’s £150, a war that shouldn’t have let two people meet, a wife who nagged a blood test out of him that saved his life, a brother who ran out of time, and the phrase that still drives him mad: you make your own luck.

It isn’t a self-help book. There’s no five-step plan. It’s fifty years of watching people’s lives from a salon chair, turned into an argument you won’t be able to shake — that luck isn’t something you build. It’s something you’re given, unevenly, before you ever had a say in it.

What’s inside:

• The stranger, the number, and the morning that started it all

• Your birth, your body, your era, your country — and what luck had to do with each one

• The blood test that saved his life

• His brother Philip, and the kitchen table he’ll never forget

• A seventeen-hour train journey, a door in Vienna, a stranger who let him in

• Why “you make your own luck” is, in his words, cruelty wearing a nice jumper

By the end, you’ll be asked one question, and you won’t be able to answer it the same way you would have before you started.

What’s your percentage?