How We Are cover art

How We Are

How to Live Trilogy, Book 1

 Preview
Get this deal Try Premium Plus free
Offer ends December 16, 2025 11:59pm GMT.
Prime members: New to Audible? Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Just £0.99/mo for your first 3 months of Audible.
1 bestseller or new release per month—yours to keep.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, podcasts, and Originals.
Auto-renews at £8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically.

How We Are

By: Vincent Deary
Narrated by: Matthew Brenher
Get this deal Try Premium Plus free

£8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly. Offer ends December 16, 2025 11:59pm GMT.

£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £12.99

Buy Now for £12.99

Only £0.99 a month for the first 3 months. Pay £0.99 for the first 3 months, and £8.99/month thereafter. Renews automatically. Terms apply. Start my membership

About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin.

We are creatures of habit, living most of our lives automatically, in small worlds of more or less comfortable routine. But sometimes outside forces compel us to adjust, and sometimes we must make changes ourselves. What happens when change disrupts our lives? This book is the first in a trilogy which offers an insight unlike any other into the human mind and heart: how we are, how we break, and how we mend. It is about all of us, humbly figuring out how to live.

©2015 Vincent Deary (P)2024 Penguin Audio Consciousness & Thought Philosophy

Listeners also enjoyed...

 ADHD Unpacked cover art
A Life of Meaning cover art
How to Thrive with Adult ADHD cover art
How to Be Your Own Therapist cover art
Compete to Create cover art
Exhausted cover art
Welcoming the Unwelcome cover art

Critic reviews

Exhilarating, lyrical, consoling... His voice is pleasingly sardonic one of a peer who finds this stuff as difficult and disorientating as the rest of us (Oliver Burkeman)
A book about human nature. It's crammed with ideas. It makes your head spin, in a good way (William Leith)
Fascinating, profound, wonderfully well-observed... [How We Are] could change lives (Bel Mooney)
An honest, self-searching voice, rich in images and characters' stories (Antonia Macaro)
All stars
Most relevant
Just a brilliant book, needed to listen to it too as there was so much to take in. Written with clarity, humour and profound wisdom. Now onto How We Break.. and roll on the third instalment

A Book Brimming with ideas

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
This is a marvellous book. The writing is full of rich analogy and striking examples from literature, film, personal and professional experience. I have bought the actual book because the audio narration was troubling.
The “voice” has a resonant baritone quality and standard English pronunciation. It has a recurring cadence that drops to the same pitch in every sentence. It misreads and mispronounces foreign words because it is, I suspect, at least partially AI generated. The “reader “ applies the same intonation to every statement without giving any sense of engagement with the text. I would buy the audio book again, read by the author or someone able to do justice to the exceptional writing.

A book that explores the human condition

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
I get the feeling that the author is coming from his heart. The narrator isn't.

Don't be put off by the narrator.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.