?Self often enough writes with such vividness it's as if he is the first person to see anything at all.??The New York Times

A fiercely original, darkly comic and deeply personal exploration of London and its suburbs, written in the shadow of Will Self's confrontation with mortality

Facing a one-in-five chance of dying during a stem cell transplant for blood cancer?odds slightly worse than Russian roulette?Will Self realized that, having spent most of his life in London's Zone Two, he might well die in Zone One. Some people, confronted by such a prospect, might travel somewhere exotic. Self chose instead to go deeper than ever before into the ancient, strange and haunted metropolis of his birth.

Walking outwards through London in the four cardinal directions, Self passes beyond the familiar city of Dickens and Holmes into the vast suburban expanse that surrounds it: the rus in urbe and the urbs in rure, where ethnic succession, speculative development, and buried histories have continually remade the capital. These ambulations also lead backwards, into the life and work of Self's father, Peter Self, one of the 1960s ?activators? who helped make the contemporary built environment, for good or ill. The result is a matryoshka doll of suburban experience: the son walking through landscapes the father theorized and planned, while excavating the family life concealed inside their model garden suburb.

Combining memoir, history, psychogeography and polemic, Self develops a theory of suburbia's ?heterotopic isotropy?: its uncanny power to remain recognizably the same while differing everywhere. Et in Suburbia Ego is both a paean and profound meditation?and the book Self's readers have long been waiting for.