Böcker av Olivia Laing

From one of our most original contemporary voices, The Garden Against Time is an inventive and deeply felt exploration of the long dream of a shared Eden, a common paradise.

Olivia Laing, prize-winning, bestselling author of The Lonely City and Crudo, returns with a career-spanning collection of essays on the power of art in times of crisis.

A dazzling investigation into loneliness, art and the modern city - 'A fierce and essential work' Helen Macdonald

A blisteringly funny and remarkably tender debut novel from Olivia Laing, one of the finest non-fiction writers of her generation.

The author of The Lonely City takes readers on an ambitious investigation into the body in the twentieth century, using the life of the renegade psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich to chart an electrifying course through the great freedom movements of the era, from gay rights and sexual liberation to feminism and the civil-rights movement.

Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism#1 Book of the Year from Brain PickingsNamed a best book of the year by NPR, Newsweek, Slate, Pop Sugar, Marie Claire, Elle, Publishers Weekly, and Lit HubA dazzling work of biography, memoir, and cultural criticism on the subject of loneliness, told through the lives of iconic artists, by the acclaimed author of The Trip to Echo Spring.When Olivia Laing moved to New York City in her midthirties, she found herself inhabiting loneliness on a daily basis. Increasingly fascinated by the most shameful of experiences, she began to explore the lonely city by way of art. Moving from Edward Hopper's Nighthawks to Andy Warhol's Time Capsules, from Henry Darger's hoarding to David Wojnarowicz's AIDS activism, Laing conducts an electric, dazzling investigation into what it means to be alone, illuminating not only the causes of loneliness but also how it might be resisted and redeemed.Humane, provocative, and moving, The Lonely City is a celebration of a strange and lovely state, adrift from the larger continent of human experience, but intrinsic to the very act of being alive.

In 2020, Olivia Laing began to restore an 18th century walled garden in Suffolk, an overgrown Eden of unusual plants. The work brought to light a crucial question for our age: Who gets to live in paradise, and how can we share it while there's still time? Moving between real and imagined gardens, from Milton's Paradise Lost to John Clare's enclosure elegies, from a wartime sanctuary in Italy to a grotesque aristocratic pleasure ground funded by slavery, Laing interrogates the sometimes shocking cost of making paradise on earth.But the story of the garden doesn't always enact larger patterns of privilege and exclusion. It's also a place of rebel outposts and communal dreams. From the improbable queer utopia conjured by Derek Jarman on the beach at Dungeness to the fertile vision of a common Eden propagated by William Morris, new modes of living can and have been attempted amidst the flower beds, experiments that could prove vital in the coming era of climate change. The result is a humming, glowing tapestry, a beautiful and exacting account of the abundant pleasures and possibilities of gardens: not as a place to hide from the world but as a site of encounter and discovery, bee-loud and pollen-laden.

As Chosen By ... is a photographic series by Kate Friend. In these portraits, her 'sitters' are flowers or plants, each one selected by a recognisable public figure.

A New York Times Notable, Washington Post, NPR, Guardian, and Bustle Best Book of 2018 A brilliant, funny, and emphatically raw novel of love on the brink of the apocalypse, from the acclaimed author of The Lonely City.

'A gentle, wise and riddling book. Its prose, like the river it describes, flows intricately, unpredictably and often beautifully, carrying the fascinated reader onwards' Robert Macfarlane

One of the best reviewed books of 2013, also shortlisted for the 2013 Costa Biography Award, now available in paperback