Complete and unabridged, with 98 full-page plates by Pieter de Hooch, Joseph Wright of Derby and Gerrit Adriaenszoon Berckheyde. A man sets out to write his life and gets stuck before his own birth, digressing through his uncle's model fortifications, a black page, a marbled page and a blank one left for the reader. Sterne published it in instalments over eight years and was famous by the second. It broke every rule of narration before most of them had been made. Ninety-eight plates after Zoffany and Hogarth, from family groups to seashores and imaginary villages, mirror the digressions and side-shows of a life that keeps wandering off its own path.