Your Inner Fish: A Journey Into the 3.5 Billion-Year History of the Human Body
By Neil Shubin
Allen Lane £20, 240 pages
FT bookshop price: £16

If you want to understand the evolutionary history of man and other animals, and read no other account this year, read this splendid monograph. And if you subscribe to “creationist” tendencies, read it also and repent your sorry ways.