Leaving Home

byMark Haddon

A Memoir in Full Colour

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'Tender, transporting, creative and beautifully written ... Simply glorious, from start to finish' Rachel Clarke, author of Dear Life

Simultaneously heart-breaking and darkly hilarious, Leaving Home is a portrait of the artist both as a child and as an adult.

Mark Haddon's parents were not really cut out for the job of having children. They were cut out, respectively, for the jobs of designing abattoirs and keeping a pathologically clean and tidy house. At least Mark had the consolations of The Weetabix Solar System Wallchart, walnut whips and the occasional Babycham.

Astringently honest and scalpel sharp, this is a book about being different and seeing the world differently. It’s about being a cartoonist and a care assistant. It’s about family. It’s about how art, in all its varied forms, provides a way of understanding and coming to terms with the mess of human life. And it’s richly illustrated throughout with images from the author’s childhood.

As bracing as it is embracing, Leaving Home is about escaping a place that never felt like home and learning to create somewhere that does.

'I loved this funny, melancholy and arrestingly original memoir of an artist's coming into being' Sarah Perry, author of Enlightenment

'His distillation of the fear and powerlessness of childhood is so deeply moving and beautifully drawn ... The most tender, transporting, creative and beautifully written tale I have read all year. In Leaving Home, Mark Haddon turns words, images and his trademark empathy upon himself to conjure all the repressed emotion, strained relationships, shyness, humour and orange formica of his childhood in 1970s provincial England. Simply glorious, from start to finish'

Rachel Clarke, author of The Story of a Heart

About Mark Haddon

Mark Haddon is a writer and artist. His bestselling novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003) won seventeen literary prizes, was translated into forty-five languages, and went on to become an award-winning stage adaptation by Simon Stephens. His most recent works of fiction include a novel, The Porpoise (2019), and a collection of fables and stories, Dogs and Monsters (2024).
Details
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • ISBN: 9781529960761
  • Length: 224 pages
  • Price: £13.99
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