Can reading literature really help our mental health? This book shows how and why - not by instruction or prescription but by emotion and exploration. 

Offering case histories of individual readers and reading groups based on the work of The Reader, a charity dedicated to bringing serious literature to neglected communities, the authors showcase how a whole new demographic might get into reading, and in doing so unlock the emotional intelligence and benefits to health and wellbeing which come from our access to written human stories and imagined situations.

'I read Reading:Arts for Health with deep interest and pleasure, as will anyone who believes in sustaining a culture which recognises the indispensability of serious reading. There is no piety or nostalgia or wishful thinking in the authors' analysis. They provide expert practical advice as to how to engage, transformationally, new readers in situations that others might regard as irretrievably disadvantaged. The combination of passion and practicality in this book will appeal both to the general reader and to the professional.' -- Rt Hon Lord Alan Howarth of Newport, founder and Co-Chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Arts, Health and Wellbeing

Philip Davis is Emeritus Professor of Literature and Psychology at the University of Liverpool, UK and was the director of CRILS (Centre for Research into Reading, Literature and Society). 

Fiona Magee combines the three main strands of this book: research into literary reading, the compilation of interviews and films of case histories, and the practice of shared reading.