Faber snaps up Minshall's 'essential' insight on man-made objects

Faber has acquired Your Life is Manufactured by Tim Minshall, an insight into the hidden world behind everyday man-made objects.

Fred Baty, commissioning editor for non-fiction, acquired UK and Commonwealth rights, excluding Canada and including audio, from Laura Macdougall at United Agents. Publication is scheduled for April 2025.

The publisher said: "We all live in a manufactured world. Everything around you other than people, plants, rocks and animals has been made by someone and delivered to where it is needed. And yet the processes by which these things appear in our lives are largely invisible. 

"Your Life is Manufactured lifts the curtain to reveal this hidden, byzantine world of manufacturing. From clothing to foodstuffs, construction to transport, and medicines to technology, Tim Minshall offers us a uniquely engrossing and entertaining insight into this fundamental yet routinely overlooked aspect of our lives. At the same time, he calls into question the environmental impact of the systems we have created in order to fulfil our desire for ever more objects, delivered at ever greater speeds."

Minshall is the inaugural Dr John C Taylor Professor of Innovation and the head of the Institute for Manufacturing at the University of Cambridge. He is an award-winning lecturer, researches and writes about manufacturing, innovation and skills, and regularly delivers talks on these topics nationally and internationally. He delivers outreach programmes to raise awareness of manufacturing among primary and secondary schoolchildren and their teachers. Before becoming an academic, he worked in Japan and Australia as a teacher, consultant and engineer. 

"I am so excited to have such a great publisher as Faber & Faber working with me on this book," he said. "The contents draw on my experiences of teaching and researching at the University of Cambridge Institute for Manufacturing and working with hundreds of manufacturing firms over the past 20 years. It also draws on the experiences and stories of our alumni who came to Cambridge to learn about engineering and manufacturing, and who have gone on to lead the charge towards manufacturing a better world."

Baty added: "I could not be more thrilled to be working with Tim in bringing this essential book to life. It has everything I love in a piece of truly remarkable non-fiction: taking a familiar subject and exploding it into its constituent parts to reveal a whole new world of intrigue and complexity.

"Tim’s infectious enthusiasm and clear expertise leap off the page, enabling us to simultaneously revel in the brilliance of our manufacturing processes and the people that have designed them, as well as to consider our individual role in perpetuating them at the planet’s cost. I was immediately hooked by the proposal, and am sure readers worldwide will be likewise by the finished book."