Leaving Home

‘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 *‘Really extraordinary book. Painful, funny, beautifully illustrated. Nobody does it quite like Mark Haddon’ * Max Porter, author of Grief is the Thing with Feathers *‘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 Enlightenment *‘I loved Leaving Home. It made me honk with laughter at times, and feel incredibly moved at others. I found it tender, addictive, informative and unlike anything else – and brilliantly illustrated. It’s a gem’ * Rachel Joyce, author of The Homemade God *‘As well as being startlingly – sometimes shockingly – honest, this memoir is consistently funny and consistently heartbreaking. The result for me was a kind of emotional whiplash, pain then laughter, warmth then brutality – all in service of rendering the complexities of family life in full colour.’ * Joe Dunthorne, author of Children of Radium *‘This book is beautiful and surprising and thought-provoking and sad and lovely and various other things - you should read it’ * Dr Lucy Foulkes, author of Coming of Age *There is much to savour about the inside life of such a creative mind… Haddon has written a highly captivating book about escape, survival and the problems of processing a torrid past * Independent *Leaving Home…brims with anxiety, empathy and a kind of zinging, cleansing innocence… [delivered] with humour and wincing honesty * Observer *A brutally unsparing childhood memoir * Sunday Times *[A] blistering memoir… an incredibly detailed, painful, funny, horrifying and exhilarating record of how to live beside what has happened * Guardian *

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).

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