Stuff Matters: The Strange Stories of the Marvellous Materials that Shape Our Man-made World

* * * Winner of the 2014 Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books * * *

Stuff Matters by Mark Miodnownik is a unique and inspiring exploration of human creativity.

'Enthralling. A mission to re-acquaint us with the wonders of the fabric that sustains our lives' Guardian

Everything is made of something...

From the everyday objects in our homes to the most extraordinary new materials that will shape our future, Stuff Matters reveals the inner workings of the man-made world, the miracles of craft, design, engineering and ingenuity that surround us every day.

From the tea-cup to the jet engine, the silicon chip to the paper clip, from the ancient technologies of fabrics and ceramic to today's self-healing metals and bionic implants, this is a book to inspire amazement and delight at mankind's creativity.

'A certain sort of madness may be necessary to pull off what he has attempted here, which is a wholesale animation of the inanimate: Miodownik achieves precisely what he sets out to' The Times