Olivia Laing

In The Lonely City, Olivia Laing charts her journey through New York City in her mid-thirties, when she found herself grappling with an overwhelming sense of loneliness. Rather than succumb to this isolating experience, Laing delves deep into the fabric of the city's artistic landscape, exploring the intersections of solitude and creativity. Moving seamlessly through the works and lives of...

What a wonderful book this is. I loved the enchanting and beautifully written story but also the fascinating and thoughtful excursions along the way. – Nigel Slater A garden contains secrets, we all know that: buried elements that might put on strange growth or germinate in unexpected places. The garden that I chose had walls, but like every garden it...

Why did numerous celebrated authors become entwined with the grip of alcoholism? In The Trip to Echo Spring, Olivia Laing weaves an evocative journey across America, probing the intricate interplay between creativity and alcohol through the intertwined lives and works of six literary giants: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, John Berryman, John Cheever, and Raymond Carver. Laing embarks...

Over sixty years after Virginia Woolf's tragic drowning in the River Ouse, Olivia Laing embarks on a journey that intertwines the natural world with poignant reflections on life and literature. In To the River, Laing sets out to walk along the banks of this historic river, tracing its path from its source to the sea. This journey is not just...

At once a queer love story and a noirish thriller, set in the dream factory of cinema, The Silver Book is a fictional account of real things, and an investigation into the difficult relationship between artifice and truth, illusion and reality, love and power. 'It is dangerous to want someone this much. He has always known it, from the very...

In this remarkable, inspiring collection of essays, acclaimed writer and critic Olivia Laing makes a brilliant case for why art matters, especially in the turbulent political weather of the twenty first century. Funny Weather brings together a career's worth of Laing's writing about art and culture, examining its role in our political and emotional lives. She profiles Jean-Michel Basquiat and...

The Silver Book by Olivia Laing is a unique blend of queer love story and true crime thriller set against the backdrop of 1970s cinema, brought to life by the award-winning, bestselling author. It is September 1974. Two men meet by chance in Venice. One is a young English artist, in panicked flight from London. The other is Danilo Donati,...

Shortlisted for the Goldsmith's Prize, the Gordon Burn Prize and the James Tait Black Award. Dive into a tale of love and loathing with the beach read of the summer. Kathy is a writer. Kathy is getting married. It's the summer of 2017 and the whole world is falling apart. From a Tuscan hotel for the super-rich to a Brexit-paralysed...