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A Memoir in Full Colour
by Mark Haddon
An unflinching, brilliantly written, darkly funny, lavishly illustrated memoir by the acclaimed author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time: A ringing testament about how one artist sees the world, and how his experiences have shaped his vision.
Simultaneously heart-breaking and hilarious, Leaving Home is a portrait of the artist both as a child and as an adult. His 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 he 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 knickerbocker glories and heart surgery, about papier mâché and mental breakdown and great white sharks. 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. It's richly illustrated throughout with images from the author's childhood, some of them altered in unforgivable ways. 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.
"Although Haddon reflects on positive aspects of his life—his teaching, writing, happy marriage, fatherhood, and deeply satisfying volunteer work with the Samaritans—darkness and sadness pervade his forthright memoir. Candid, disquieting memories." —Kirkus Reviews
"[Haddon] writes with uncanny humor and endearing candor as he leapfrogs from childhood incidents to more recent struggles and discoveries...The illustrations—his drawing, paintings, collages, and sculptors along with photographs and postcards—mirror his writing in their mix of zest, wit, and pain. No matter how grim his experiences, Haddon turns anguish into compassion and kindness. As he reflects on his hardtested loyalty to his parents and his love for his sister, wife, and children, Haddon is pithily hilarious, deeply insightful, and very moving." —Booklist
"In Mark Haddon's moving collage-like memoir, significant moments in the author's life add up to a wondrous whole and provocative worldview...Haddon's bracing, raw honesty reveals his struggle with mental illness, his love for his wife and two children, his views on spirituality, and the life-giving force of his writing...Haddon's recollections create a moving cumulative effect; he gives readers the space to savor his epiphanies and arrive at their own." —Shelf Awareness
"I loved this funny, melancholy and arrestingly original memoir of an artist's coming into being. It also made me quite badly want a Walnut Whip." ―Sarah Perry, author of The Essex Serpent and 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
This information about Leaving Home was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
© Nigel Barklie
Mark Haddon is the author of the bestselling novels The Red House and A Spot of Bother. His novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for First Fiction and is the basis for the Tony Award–winning play. He is the author of a collection of poetry, The Talking Horse and the Sad Girl and the Village Under the Sea, has written and illustrated numerous children's books, and has won awards for both his radio dramas and his television screenplays. He teaches creative writing for the Arvon Foundation and lives in Oxford, England.
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