Alex Wade is a respectable professional man, with a responsible white-collar job. But once in a while he puts on his gloves, steps into a boxing ring and hits another man in the face while trying to avoid getting hit in return. Welcome to the world of the 'Real Fight Club', where lawyers, surveyors and City traders swap their pinstripes for mouthguards and experience the kind of adrenaline rush that only unarmed combat can bring. But what drives these largely middle-class, often affluent men to invite a punch to the head? For Alex Wade it became a way of addressing his own demons, and facing up to the fact that, despite the respectable veneer, his first three decades had been marked by a tendency to violence and self-destruction. As he describes in this gripping and moving memoir, it was only through a world of organised violence that he truly came to know himself.

Alex Wade is a freelance journalist and lawyer who advises several national newspapers on legal issues. He lives with his family in Cornwall.