Rose George confronts the last taboo and takes us on an unprecedented tour through a world full of sewage - which, via the diseases it transmits, kills more people worldwide every year than any other single cause and yet, through prurience and distaste, remains the most significant global issue about which few talk or think.

Produced behind closed doors, disposed of discreetly, hidden by euphemism, shit is rarely out in the open in 'civilised' society, but the world of waste - and the people who deal with it, work with it and in it - is a rich one. This book will take us underground to the sewers of Paris and London and overground, to meet the heroes of India's sanitation movement, the R&D lab-rats at the cutting edge of toilet technology, and the owner of the world's largest toilet paper collection. With a journalist's nose for a story, and a campaigner's desire for change, Rose George also addresses the politics of this under-reported social and environmental effluent, and the consequences of our reluctance to talk about it: bad sewage is the single biggest cause of death in the world.

Witty, serious and original, The Big Necessity proves that shit doesn't have to be - and shouldn't be - a dirty word.