Allen Carr was an accountant and smoked 100 cigarettes a day until he gave up and wrote this bestselling book. He built a hugely successful network of stop-smoking clinics across the world and is the author of The Only Way to Stop Smoking, How to Stop Your Child Smoking, The Easy Way to Enjoy Flying and The Easyweigh to Lose Weight. In 2004 Allen published his bestselling autobiography Packing It In (Michael Joseph). He was diagnosed with lung cancer in the summer of 2006 and died in November of the same year. It seems likely that the years he spent curing smokers in smoke-filled sessions at his clinics must have contributed to this illness, but Allen Carr remained positive; 'Given that I am informed that I have cured at least 10 million smokers on a conservative estimation, it's a price worth paying.'