Description: Most bookshops sell titles aimed at how to fix you. Whether it’s leadership, management, self-help or therapy, fitness or food, alternative lifestyle or mindfulness, so much of what’s offered is geared towards reinforcing the message that you need to change, that you’re living your life the wrong way, or that you’re not fulfilling your potential.

This book is different. It doesn’t tell anyone to change. Its purpose is to encourage reflection, nurture curiosity, and challenge assumptions.

Verdict: Inside these pages, Author Fergal Barr has outlined 50 lessons, each of which is underpinned by a set of values and beliefs gained directly from the author’s lived experiences.

Aimed at provoking one’s thoughts about a wide range of contemporary issues, these lessons also ask its readers to reflect on their own values and beliefs, and, in doing so, to contemplate their future approaches to different issues.

In what is quite a delightful read, and one that lovingly captures half a century of wisdom - the ups, the downs and the sideways - of life, this earnest Londonderry granddad Fergal Barr has brought forth a book that once picked up is oh-so very hard to put down.

Furthermore, and given that Barr’s book is fully entitled 50 lessons in 50 years — A Middle-aged Man’s Guide to Not Fecking Things Up, well, you can tell what you are in for before you even dive in!

A former youth worker in his native Derry, avid reader Barr has brought together a wondrous book of prose here, one that showcases his generous knowledge acquired through his very own experiences. But trust me when I say that his experiences are, for the most part, a lot of our own (those of us 50 and above), so you will quickly start to see a lot of you in each off these chapters.

Currently working within shared education, his three self-published books, two of which are of poetry, were written purely as a hobby and include The Yet Unknown Little Brown Book, In No Particular Order, and The Things People Say: Political Quotations from the Northern Ireland Peace Process.

About the Author Fergal Barr is a parent, grandparent, youth worker, Liverpool supporter, tea drinker, avid book reader (non-fiction), humor and music lover, and occasional author. He lives in Derry, Northern Ireland.

Official Book Purchase Link