https://www.olivialaing.com/events daily 0.75 2026-03-12 https://www.olivialaing.com/home daily 1.0 2025-07-08 https://www.olivialaing.com/contact daily 0.75 2026-03-05 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/349644b5-0033-405a-b4e8-e94d237f12d7/IMG_1640.jpeg Contact Credit: Chiara Barzini https://www.olivialaing.com/to-the-river daily 0.75 2025-07-08 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/1612709601189-7C127EO0RLPYBH89OTYW/To+the+River+cover+1 To the River - ‘I am haunted by waters. It may be that I’m too dry in myself, too English, or it may be simply that I’m susceptible to beauty, but I do not feel truly at ease on this earth unless there’s a river nearby…’ To the River is the story of the Ouse, the river in which Virginia Woolf drowned in 1941. One midsummer week over sixty years later, Olivia Laing walked Woolf’s river from source to sea. In part a biography of this most fluid of writers, To the River is also a passionate investigation into how history resides in a landscape – and how ghosts never quite leave the places they love. Along the way, Laing explores the roles rivers play in human lives, tracing their intricate flow through literature and mythology alike. The result is a wonderfully discursive read, interweaving biography, history, nature writing and memoir. It’s a beautiful, lyrical work that marks the arrival of a major new writer. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/1612709741718-N10E9UT4FPGH90HHHU3Q/To+the+River+cover+2 To the River - ‘A haul of gems.’ Boyd Tonkin, Books of the Year, Independent Buy in the UK: Bookshop.org, LRB, Foyles, Waterstones, Amazon Buy in the US: Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org, Indiebound, Amazon Listen: to an interview on Woman’s Hour From the reviews... ‘This is Laing’s first book and, without wanting to sound gushing – the watery metaphor bug is catching – her writing at its sublime best reminds me of Richard Mabey’s nature prose and the poetry of Alice Oswald (there are parallels with Oswald’s muscular verse on the River Dart). Like these two, and John Clare before them, Laing seems to lack a layer of skin, rendering her susceptible to the smallest vibrations of the natural world as well as to the frailties of the human psyche.’ Jane Wheatley, Times ‘Arrestingly beautiful . . . This is an uplifting book, which not only develops into a work of considerable richness, but as the river reaches the open sea, expresses its message of hope with increasing lyricism and uncluttered simplicity.’ Juliet Nicolson, Evening Standard ‘Olivia Laing has written a magical book. It is acutely alive, observational, redolent with pithy phrases and arresting images . . . By turns lyrical, melancholic and exultant, To the River just makes you want to follow Olivia Laing all the way down to the sea.’ Philip Hoare, Sunday Telegraph ‘Of Olivia Laing’s prose, we could simply say that words have a way with her and that her delight in language is at one with her absorption in the living world.’ Laura Marcus, Times Literary Supplement ‘Laing is a brilliant wordsmith and this is a beautifully accomplished book.’ Frances Spalding, Independent ‘A brave, distinctive, and deeply intelligent addition to that protean genre mixing nature, history and travel writing which is becoming one of the richest forms of contemporary British literature.’ Alexandra Harris, Literary Review ‘Olivia Laing is a new and thoughtful voice in the tradition of W.G. Sebald. I confidently expect it to be listed in this year’s favourite books.’ Joan Bakewell, Telegraph ‘The power of To the River lies in the quality of the prose, by turns lush and limpid. As Ms. Laing walks, birds turn in the air, fish mass in the waters, and thoughts of former travelers flit before her.’ Alice Albinia, Wall Street Journal https://www.olivialaing.com/books daily 0.75 2024-07-03 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/23d58900-ea06-4ecc-a3fc-949cb5b1e43f/Lonely+City+HB+cover.jpg Books The Lonely City 10th anniversary edition https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/86586b74-044c-4f7a-8d95-8c559c934f78/Screenshot+2025-07-18+at+15.34.47.png Books Painting Writing Texting by Chantal Joffe and Olivia Laing https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/54ce2d6b-b6ba-409b-8811-b4366df49fd9/TheSilverBook_B3.jpg Books The Silver Book by Olivia Laing https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/890bf96a-fb5b-43a6-b6eb-b289d3e21ca4/Screen+Shot+2023-11-25+at+16.48.10.png Books The Garden Against Time by Olivia Laing https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/ee5c7dd0-0ed4-412c-ba12-77ed0abf4180/Screen+Shot+2022-04-07+at+12.32.50.png Books Everybody: A Book About Freedom by Olivia Laing https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/4319c9ce-2f27-4167-a5c4-2bc6a52f5ebe/Funny+Weather.jpg Books Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/5a68079a-2649-4301-a7fb-3bba8345ac1d/9781509892839.jpg Books Crudo by Olivia Laing https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/ad28ffe1-b80c-4f22-bd13-5a70e12b27d3/Screen+Shot+2023-07-30+at+19.07.09.png Books The Lonely City by Olivia Laing https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/d7ac876a-a289-4dc2-900d-c0bae3bf5eee/9781786891600.jpg Books The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking by Olivia Laing https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/3f868ab7-0ca6-4224-8ca2-cfc030042696/9781786891587.jpg Books To the River by Olivia Laing https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/808733f9-0221-4e7c-b424-0328306d8741/image3.jpeg Books A Garden Manifesto, edited by Olivia Laing and Richard Porter https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/1753004787319-7J3HC0MI07RHU598LGXO/9780847860517.jpg Books Tilda Swinton: Ongoing https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/6a417ebb-ac1c-4809-a7e8-dc6e338f08b9/Screenshot+2025-06-26+at+13.19.31.png Books I Remember by Joe Brainard https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/e551a295-459a-435b-bc99-ebf65c8832bb/616P7-WZcQL.jpg Books Do Everything in the Dark by Gary Indiana https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/89e1cf8c-325b-45cc-be44-96ecef9454dd/VW_Vol3.jpg Books The Diary of Virginia Woolf Volume 3 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/1b7e20cf-78d7-45f5-9b6b-a749253c02c3/Screen+Shot+2024-12-16+at+15.07.26.png Books Derek Jarman: The Authorised Biography by Tony Peake https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/a4accb88-cf0e-4a84-88d7-6c117be0dbd6/9781786890283.jpg Books Close to the Knives by David Wojnarowicz https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/eeb8481b-9052-4c53-a4d6-6ccdfd33e7f1/-collid%3Dbooks_covers_0%26isbn%3D9781635901665%26type%3D.jpg Books Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black by Cookie Mueller https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/9a569b50-f56b-4a54-9f89-61a99c3da45a/9781784873875.jpg Books Modern Nature by Derek Jarman https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/0732bba6-576d-4b7e-b4ed-9938bcef0067/9781784700065.jpg Books Waterlog by Roger Deakin https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/ffadaba6-e7c8-4228-91ce-dade0530aeba/Martin_CVR_082421_HR_edit.width-1100.jpg Books Agnes Martin: The Distillation of Colour https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/89e08318-3518-42a6-b530-524d42719e2c/9780500971086.jpg Books Derek Jarman: Protest https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/49eaad64-d19c-4c38-bf93-53ce4e973bb5/Screen+Shot+2023-04-25+at+08.00.48.png Books Grace is Like New Music by Lee Mary Manning https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/ceb9ea6b-5d12-4df8-bc93-00335f25fc8d/9780847869251.jpg Books Andy Warhol Tate Modern exhibition catalgue https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/8fee3184-2155-4cd1-ad2e-194a286f70e8/Screenshot+2025-05-24+at+19.40.40.png Books Magdalena Suarez Frimkess https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/29933c7c-23cb-4b36-b21a-7352a43449a1/05ac74a734e3c0b3dc13a91820a48adf8ab30912-4369x29001_1.jpg Books Daily Weeding by Kuba Ryniewicz https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/58c4150d-3b94-4400-8107-d7990e228ba2/51eO0sXXJPL._AC_UF1000%2C1000_QL80_.jpg Books Portraits by Kate Friend https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/aee9b84a-c66c-478f-afab-1ebaa0bbf375/Allotments-paperback-Classic-v1-copy-19-540x810.png Books The Allotment by Colin Ward and David Crouch https://www.olivialaing.com/funny-weather daily 0.75 2025-12-02 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/1652707347697-3MBK44NYYJRFSTGPVSIL/Funny+Weather.jpg Funny Weather ‘Funny Weather is populated by artists who move and excite me, who look with sharp eyes at the societies they inhabit, but who also propose new ways of seeing…’ 'In this remarkable, inspiring collection of essays, Olivia Laing makes a brilliant case for why art matters, especially in the turbulent political weather of the 21st 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 Georgia O’Keefe, interviews Hilary Mantel and Ali Smith, writes love letters to David Bowie and Freddie Mercury, and explores loneliness and technology, women and alcohol, sex and the body. With characteristic originality and compassion, she celebrates art as a force of resistance and repair, an antidote to a frightening time. We’re often told art can’t change anything. Laing argues that it can. It changes how we see the world. It makes plain inequalities and it offers fertile new ways of living. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/1612707380615-LWOAK8QSDYAXJ50CCGPG/Funny+Weather+US+cover Funny Weather - ‘Frankly, it's essential to read anything Laing writes.’ The Bookseller Buy in the UK: Foyles, LRB, Amazon, Waterstones (international delivery) Buy in the US: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org, Indiebound Out now: Swedish, Korean Coming soon: Italian, Turkish, Russian, French Read: extract in Guardian, profile in New York Magazine, interviews in Bomb, AnOther Magazine, PEN, Garage, London Review Bookshop, feature in Dazed Listen: Monocle, Start the Week, Great Women Artists, LA Review of Books Watch: in conversation at the Center for Fiction From the reviews… ‘Laing has acted as a kind of cultural sage for the past four years, an accidental literary grande dame of the emotional havoc wrought by late capitalism and digital disconnect.’ New York Magazine ‘A thought-provoking, inspiring collection that you can go back to whenever the weather takes a funny turn.’ Evening Standard ‘Funny Weather gives the reader a tangible sense of the sprawling garden of work which Laing has planted. She is to the art world what David Attenborough is to nature: a worthy guide with both a macro and micro vision, fluent in her chosen tongue and always full of empathy and awe.’ Irish Times ‘An incivisive meditation on the value of heartfelt, messy art in our paranoid times.’ Telegraph ‘The hospitality of world view in Olivia’s writing is a vital force in our disputatious present.’ Maria Balshaw, director of Tate ‘I yield to absolutely no one in my admiration of Olivia Laing; her essays are magical liberations of words and ideas, art and love; they’re the essence of great 21st century literature: brilliantly expressed, wildly uncontained, wilful and wonderfully unbound.’ Philip Hoare, author of RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTAR ‘Like all great critics, Olivia Laing combines formidable intelligence with boundless curiosity and fabulous taste, but she also has a rare quality of intimacy; an ability to connect the reader to a work of art or literature (or for that matter a facet of life itself) with a directness that lights it up like nothing else. It’s why I read her.’ James Lasdun, author of Afternoon of a Faun ‘A warm, thinking, enticing sweep of a book, like spending the afternoon with your brainiest friend.’ Kate Mosse, author of The Burning Chamber https://www.olivialaing.com/about daily 0.75 2026-02-10 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/7d545c35-909c-438b-8e4f-8db1ecb5e9e5/OL+by+Toby+Glanville+copy.jpg About - Make it stand out Credit: Toby Glanville https://www.olivialaing.com/lonely-city daily 0.75 2026-02-13 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/23d58900-ea06-4ecc-a3fc-949cb5b1e43f/Lonely+City+HB+cover.jpg Lonely City - ‘Loneliness is personal, and it is also political. It is collective; it is a city…’ What does it mean to be lonely? How do we live, if we’re not intimately engaged with another human being? How do we connect with other people? Does technology draw us closer together or trap us behind screens? When Olivia Laing moved to New York City in her mid-thirties, she found herself inhabiting loneliness on a daily basis. Fascinated by this most shameful of experiences, she began to explore the lonely city by way of art. Moving fluidly between works and lives – from Hopper’s Nighthawks to 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. Humane, provocative and moving, The Lonely City is a celebration of a strange state, adrift from the larger continent of human experience, but intrinsic to the very act of being alive. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/1612706473130-OA1DICL2S9SY0P632GZT/Lonely+City+US+cover Lonely City - ‘One of the finest writers of the new non-fiction’ Harper’s Bazaar Buy in the UK: Amazon, Blackwells, Foyles, LRB, Waterstones, Buy in the US: Amazon, Apple, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org, Indiebound, Macmillan Dutch: De Bezige Bij / Spanish: Capitan Swing / Swedish: Daidalos / Brazil: Rocco / Turkish: Ithaki / Russian: Ad Marginem / Tawainese: Business Weekly / Chinese: United Sky / Korean: Across Publishing / Italian: Il Saggiatore / Slovak: Inaque / Hungarian: Corvina / Arabic: Kalemat / Polish: Czarne / Romanian: Curte Veche / Lithuanian: Kitos Knygos / German: Btb / Finnish; Teos Coming soon: French, Ukrainian Audiobook: Audible Read: extracts in the Observer and BBC Culture, interviews with the New Yorker, Salon, Charlie Porter and Elle Listen: interviews on Radio 3, Radio 4, 6 Music and the Guardian podcast. Dance: if you're intrigued by The Lonely City’s music I made a playlist. Book of the year: Guardian, Observer, Telegraph, Irish Times, New Statesman, Times Literary Supplement, Elle, Slate, Globe & Mail, Publishers Weekly, Brainpickings and NPR. From the reviews... ‘A continually unexpected, stimulating, beautifully structured book. I am in awe of Olivia Laing’s insights, braininess, and that something that feels like recklessness until it lands.’ Peter Carey, Oscar and Lucinda ‘Ferocious intellect and expansive sympathy are joined in this profound, unclassifiable study of art, urban space, and queerness of various kinds. Thrilling, consoling, essential, this is among the best and most moving books I’ve read in years.’ Garth Greenwell, What Belongs to You ‘The Lonely City is a stunning homage to how extreme loneliness can make us more hospitable to the strangeness of others – to the risks and innovations of art and artists. Laing has written a classic that will be cherished for years to come.’ Deborah Levy, Swimming Home ‘Luminously wise and deeply compassionate, The Lonely City is a fierce and essential work. Reading it made my heart ache yet filled me with hope for the world.’ Helen Macdonald, H is for Hawk ‘Endlessly, compulsively fascinating… The Lonely City changes the way we think about art, the people who make it, and the price they pay.’ Philip Hoare, New Statesman ‘One of the most talented cultural critics of her generation…a brave, vulnerable book.’ Metro ‘Laing’s masterpiece… a layered and endlessly rewarding book, among the finest I have ever read.’ Maria Popova, Brain Pickings ‘An uncommonly observant hybrid of memoir, history and cultural criticism…a book of extraordinary compassion and insight.’ San Francisco Chronicle ‘Laing is an astute and consistently surprising culture critic…absolutely one of a kind.’ Maureen Corrigan, NPR's Fresh Air ‘This daring and seductive book – ostensibly about four artists, but actually about the universal struggle to be known – serves as both provocation and comfort, a secular prayer for those who are alone – meaning all of us.’ The New York Times Book Review https://www.olivialaing.com/crudo daily 0.75 2025-11-24 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/1612708445959-936TDFF1Z9F124CFXD02/Crudo+UK+jacket Crudo ‘Kathy, by which I mean I, is getting married. Kathy, by which I mean I, had just got off a plane from New York…’ It’s the summer of 2017 and the whole world is falling apart. Olivia Laing radically rewires the novel in a brilliant, funny & very raw account of love in the apocalypse. A 21st century Goodbye to Berlin, Crudo charts the turbulent summer of 2017 in real time, from the perspective of a commitment-phobic artist who may or may not be Kathy Acker. From a Tuscan hotel for the super-rich to a Brexit-paralysed UK, Kathy spends the first summer of her forties trying to adjust to marriage. But it’s not only Kathy who’s changing. Political, social and natural landscapes are all in peril. Fascism is on the rise, truth is dead and the planet’s hotting up. Is it really worth learning to love when the end of the world is nigh? And how do you make art, let alone a life, when one rogue tweet could end it all? https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/1612708544877-HKAOY9JLO8H7D9UVB2HA/Crudo+US+cover Crudo - ‘Love may not be original, but this funny, fervent novel is.’ New Yorker Buy in the UK: Bookshop.org, Waterstones, Foyles, LRB, Amazon. Buy in the US: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org, Indiebound, Norton Audiobook: (read by the author): Audible Read: essay in the Sunday Times, extract in Frieze, interviews in the Paris Review, Five Books, Evening Standard, Vogue and TLS Listen: LRB podcast with Ali Smith, Radio 4 Front Row, Radio 3 Free Thinking, Guardian podcast Dance: Crudo playlist Out now: China, Italy, Spain, Romania, Russia, Ukrainian Coming soon: Germany Book of the Year: New Yorker, New York Times, NPR, Washington Post, Esquire, Bustle, Paste, New Statesman, Evening Standard, Guardian, The Spinoff From the reviews… ‘I don’t think I'll ever forget the day I spent reading Crudo. I couldn't put it down, and then it overwhelmed me so much I had to put it down, and then I had to pick it up again. A beautiful, strange, intelligent novel.’ Sally Rooney, Guardian ‘Audacious . . . It’s about the longing to escape our ossified selves – to become, if only for a moment or within the pages of a novel, someone wilder and more radically free. And in staging that longing so directly and so honestly, Olivia Laing makes Crudo her own.’ New York Times ‘Laing’s book is truly exciting and, crucially, right on time.’ Johanna Fateman, 4 Columns ‘Extravagantly beautiful . . . exceptionally funny . . . Crudo traps the first summer of Trump and Brexit like a fly in amber.’ NPR ‘Intelligent and provocative . . . an important novel that shouts to the vastness and the urgency of what it means to be alive, now.’ Spectator ‘A piece of electrifying writing that captures absolutely the daily headline-bombarded, social media-refracted atmosphere of modern life.’ Daily Mail ‘Crudo is too sane and searing to be written off as purely “experimental”. . . In there with the dexterousness and sagacity of the sentences are warmth and love, humour and kindness.’ Irish Times ‘Crudo seduces from the first sentence. Laing as Acker is not literary device – it is literary detonation.’ Suzanne Moore, Observer ‘Less a novel than a single moment in modernity, deconstructed by the savagely entertaining, Acker-inspired voice of Laing.’ Paris Review ‘Written at a war-mongering time of rising nationalisms, the vitality of Olivia Laing's questioning love letter to life and to art will blow you away.’ Deborah Levy ‘Readable, shockingly new, and surprisingly tender. I didn’t want it to stop.’ Chris Kraus ‘I read it in one go, lost all sense of time, floating on the rhythm, stung by the beats, I bet Kathy Acker would have loved it, I did.’ Viv Albertine ‘The diffuse literary form of Crudo is ridiculously good. Olivia Laing has probably the most art & texture savvy sensitive ear of anyone writing today.’ Eileen Myles https://www.olivialaing.com/everybody daily 0.75 2025-11-24 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/1649331256954-WBRNRMCE4UFT8TPZC6DY/Screen+Shot+2022-04-07+at+12.32.50.png Everybody - ‘We’re all stuck in our bodies, meaning stuck inside a grid of conflicting ideas about what those bodies mean, what they’re capable of and what they’re allowed or forbidden to do…’ The body is a source of pleasure and of pain, at once hopelessly vulnerable and radiant with power. At a moment in which basic rights are once again imperilled, Olivia Laing conducts a dazzling investigation into the body and its discontents, using the life of the renegade psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich to chart a daring course through the long struggle for bodily freedom. Drawing on her own experience in protest and alternative medicine, and travelling from Weimar Berlin to the prisons of McCarthy-era America, she grapples with some of the most compelling figures of the past century, among them Nina Simone, Andrea Dworkin, Sigmund Freud, Susan Sontag and Malcolm X. Despite its many burdens, the body remains a source of power, even in an era as technologized as our own. Everybody is an examination of the forces arranged against freedom and a celebration of how ordinary human bodies can resist oppression and reshape the world. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/1645024635600-CZ7Q652DDX7VZZP74XUW/9781324022022.jpg Everybody - ‘A free-wheeling and joyful exploration’ Jack Halbestram Order in the UK: Amazon, Bookshop.org, Foyles, Waterstones Order in the US: Amazon, Apple Books, Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million, Bookshop Events: here Out now: Dutch, Spanish, Italian, Romanian, Russian, Korean, Ukrainian, German, Polish, Finnish Coming soon: China, Sweden, Turkey, Brazil, Lithuania, France Read: Guardian extract, FT profile, Vanity Fair diary, i-D interview, Dazed interview, 5 books that inspired Everybody, on writing Everybody Listen: Everybody playlist, Vox podcast, Monocle, Bomb Watch: Everybody discussions with Maggie Nelson, Sarah Schulman, Helen Mort and Susie Orbach From the reviews… ‘Laing’s gift for weaving big ideas together with lyrical prose sets her alongside the likes of Arundhati Roy, John Berger and James Baldwin. In other words, she is among the most significant voices of our time.’ Financial Times ‘Laing’s impassioned commitment to the promise of bodily freedom, of every body’s right to move and feel and love without harming or being harmed, shines through every sentence of the book. Intensely moving, vital and artful.’ Guardian ‘Everybody possesses a looseness, richness, and abundance of originality…One does not expect a political study to perform such sharp close readings of art and literature, or to describe emotions so elegantly. Line by line and thought by thought, Laing writes with surgical discipline.’ New Yorker ‘Laing is a truly thrilling thinker, with an impressively roving intellectual eye.’ Telegraph ‘Radically subversive and learned’ The Times Literary Supplement ‘A dizzying ride…both timely and beguiling’ The Sunday Times ‘It will delight new and loyal readers alike…an ambitious, absorbing achievement that will make your brain hum’ Evening Standard ‘A quintessential book for the precarious moment we’ve found ourselves in... multilayered and masterfully structured... Everybody should be required reading for anyone who cares about not just where we are now, but the future.’ Washington Post ‘A fleet, gracious tour of bodily distress and joy... Laing writes in great looping sentences, both precise and evocative.’ NPR ‘We are lucky to be living in the time of Olivia Laing... to spend time with Laing as she works through a topic, finding the unlikeliest of connective ideas wherever she looks, is to come away with a view of the world that—if not exactly clearer—is strange and rich and profound.’ LitHub ‘Daring and complicated... The method of Everybody [is] framed as an extended conversation between the author and her sources, in which De Sade blurs into Reich, who blurs into Sontag, and back again. The key to all this movement is that it also invites us to participate in the conversation.’ LA Times ‘A beautiful, strange and sprawling meditation on the relationship between the body and freedom.’ New Statesman ‘Dreaming beyond conventional wisdom and restrictive visions, Laing emboldens us to seek liberation across difference in the face of turmoil. Everybody is a galvanizing book during a time of incredible hesitation.’ Boston Globe ‘Everybody travels buoyantly through a rich swathe of cultural history to investigate bodily freedom and its curtailments… It’s a formidable undertaking, one that Laing executes savvily, her plainly diligent research synthesized in lucid, coolly urgent prose.’ 4 Columns ‘This lucid foray into some of life’s deepest questions astonishes.’ Publishers Weekly starred review ‘Intellectually vigorous and emotionally stirring’ Kirkus starred review ‘Laing’s finely crafted blend of incisive memoir and biography vitalize this unique chronicle of the endless struggle “to be free of oppression based on the kind of body” one inhabits, a work of fresh and dynamic analysis and revelation.’ Booklist starred review ‘Olivia Laing has a genius for juxtaposing ideas and lives – of artists, writers, thinkers, her own too – so that they illuminate each other in fresh, sometimes startling ways. This new book is a triumph. It bristles with energy and understanding as it charts the body’s pleasures and pains, its fragilities, and endurance in the long 20th century. This really is a book for everybody.’ Lisa Appignanesi, Mad, Bad and Sad ‘This is an astonishing project, written with equal parts stirring passion and capable intellect. Laing puts into words experiences I had never before seen in print, and the world is better for it. I love this book.’ Esmé Weijun Wang, The Collected Schizophrenias ‘Everybody is a riveting and fascinating innovative historiography of 20th century Euro-American radical thought. Brainy, open-hearted and bold.’ Sarah Schulman, Conflict Is Not Abuse ‘Laing’s particular gift lies in her unique ability to line up unlikely juxtapositions – of artists, ideas and works – and then draw clear and illuminating insights from such constellations. What her earlier work did for loneliness, this book does for liberation.’ Jack Halberstam, Gaga Feminism ‘Reading Everybody felt like hanging out with my absolute smartest friend having, somehow, the precise conversation I need to have in this historical moment. Olivia Laing’s mind is a thrill to watch . . . Rare is the book that makes you feel more alive just in reading it, but Everybody does just that.’ Alex Marzano-Lesnevich, The Fact of a Body ‘A provocative inquiry into the body’s power and vulnerability . . . casting fresh light on the unending struggles for freedom and autonomy.’ Jenn Shapland, My Autobiography of Carson McCullers ‘Through [Laing’s] incisive lens, the body – that knot of mind, matter, culture, and society that we dwell inescapably within – becomes almost impossibly fascinating.’ Alexandra Kleeman, You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine https://www.olivialaing.com/the-trip-to-echo-spring daily 0.75 2025-07-08 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/1612710925772-BLATIESD2W3U308233WY/Echo+Spring+UK+cover The Trip to Echo Spring - ‘I wanted to know what made a person drink and what it did to them. More specifically I wanted to know why writers drank, and what effect this stew of spirits has had upon the body of literature itself…’ Why is it that some of the greatest works of literature have been produced by writers in the grip of alcoholism, an addiction that cost them happiness and caused harm to those who loved them? Olivia Laing examines the link between creativity and alcohol through the work and lives of six extraordinary men: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, John Berryman, John Cheever and Raymond Carver. As she travels from Cheever’s New York to Williams’ New Orleans, from Hemingway’s Key West to Carver’s Port Angeles, she pieces together a topographical map of alcoholism, from the horrors of addiction to the miraculous possibilities of recovery. Beautiful, captivating and original,The Trip to Echo Spring strips away the myth of the alcoholic writer to reveal the terrible price creativity can exert. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/1612711325452-7BF0B89HK8Y9NEFAUZJF/Echo+Spring+US+cover The Trip to Echo Spring - ‘Original, brave and very moving.’ Peter Conrad, Observer Buy in the UK: Bookshop.org, LRB, Foyles, Waterstones, Amazon Buy in the US: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org, Indiebound, Macmillan Book of the year: New York Times, Time Magazine, Observer, Metro, Times, Economist, New Statesman and Times Literary Supplement Read: Observer extract here and Times extract here Listen: WNYC, Radio 4, KQED, CBC, KERA, NHNPR and NPR's All Things Considered From the reviews... ‘Olivia Laing’s writing is beautifully modulated, her tone knowledgeable yet intimate. She can evoke a state of mind as gracefully as she evokes a landscape. The Trip to Echo Spring is a book for all writers or would-be writers. It’s one of the best books I’ve read about the creative uses of adversity: frightening but perversely inspiring.’ Hilary Mantel ‘I loved The Trip to Echo Spring. It's a beautiful book that has stayed with me in a profound way.’ Nick Cave ‘This book is a triumphant exercise in creative reading in which diary entries, letters, poems, stories and plays are woven together to explore deep, interconnected themes of dependence, denial and self-destructiveness. It is a testimony to this book’s compelling power that having finished it, I immediately wanted to read it again.’ Scotland on Sunday ‘[A] charming and gusto-driven look at the alcoholic insanity of six famous writers . . . There is much to learn from Laing’s supple scholarship – and much to enjoy, too, in her obvious passion and engagement.’ Lawrence Osborne, New York Times ‘The book achieves its greatest force through Laing’s mix of intellect and intuition, which often recalls the New Yorker writer Janet Malcolm.’ Talitha Stevenson, New Statesman ‘Laing writes about alcoholism so eloquently, so sympathetically and so chillingly, that you can imagine this book saving somebody's life.’ The Australian ‘A good, sad book.’ Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker ‘The Trip to Echo Spring is beautifully written, haunting, tragic, and instructive in the best sense. It’s a book for writers, and for readers, a book to read more than once.’ Jane Ciabattari, NPR ‘Laing writes a fluid, fertile nonfiction . . . a wondrously rewarding book.’ Laura Miller, Salon https://www.olivialaing.com/everybody-tour daily 0.75 2021-04-28 https://www.olivialaing.com/chat daily 0.75 2023-08-01 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/1641301983826-62KWHDKM2KPT96MDG4D8/Edward_Hopper-Nighthawks-1942.jpg Chat https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/1641303385358-XP1XL4ZKF9GE5E2JNW22/Screen+Shot+2021-06-29+at+18.49.09.png Chat https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/1641314567466-S0RHITCY9H7YJLYD5UAS/IMG_3880.jpg Chat https://www.olivialaing.com/essays daily 0.75 2026-01-13 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/a8e534e7-2257-4437-9c63-8b53375821c2/7362F362-E799-4B8A-B619-FA0379F7DC6E_1_105_c.jpeg Read Pasolini: A warning from history https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/7e3f9572-045b-4e24-bb5e-aaf1c2b73b35/Screenshot+2026-02-19+at+08.37.53.png Read David Wojnarowicz https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/d11a62ae-fc51-46f8-be63-371f4de23f02/Screenshot+2025-09-24+at+08.16.23.png Read The Secret Magician: Danilo Donati in the Financial Times https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/2051a971-2a05-46b5-bbeb-060203c5314b/Screen+Shot+2024-04-27+at+09.55.39.png Read In search of paradise: Guardian extract https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/aa92f152-b723-4f3f-a684-1e9ced4e6ce1/Screenshot+2025-11-06+at+09.13.49.png Read https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/56139a37-427e-4962-9490-ecb8158a00c8/Screen+Shot+2023-08-01+at+16.02.56.png Read Observer: Art in a Time of Crisis https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/9c72ccf2-be41-407b-8b1b-8a3365e99c37/Screenshot+2025-11-10+at+15.54.02.png Read Criterion Collection Top Ten https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/24f75fdb-b13c-48c6-bd76-f842f7bfa86a/Screenshot+2026-01-29+at+17.37.12.png Read Birth by Jonathan Glazer https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/3e9c3824-ae0c-46c8-bd9a-5f7fac3ab306/Screenshot+2025-11-12+at+16.03.04.png Read LitHub: How I Wrote the Silver Book https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/1146939c-8dbe-430e-9774-335e6fd63068/Screenshot+2025-11-11+at+11.17.38.png Read A Rabbit's Foot: Inside the Dream Factory of Italian Cinema https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/a082b23c-827a-47f5-b4b2-19aad7ba1ce6/Olivia+Laing_Frame+Collage_vert.webp Read Vogue: Olivia Laing's Rome https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/85c1e080-f5f7-4d61-8ad1-8a868937695e/Screenshot+2025-11-10+at+15.55.33.png Read Frieze Ideal Syllabus https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/fea53cdb-75b0-4864-8393-302f5c84d85a/Screenshot+2025-10-29+at+17.15.30.png Read Harpers Silver Book extract https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/9fb1bcdf-cd1e-4fe9-9b55-1089148ac628/Screenshot+2025-11-11+at+11.08.14.png Read Criterion Collection Daily https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/3f793311-284e-45bf-8c6a-bc5116af4227/Screenshot+2025-06-03+at+08.33.50.png Read Electric Spark by Frances Wilson https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/dee3535a-a1e5-4e4a-abfb-f421fecbd512/Screen+Shot+2023-10-05+at+08.12.54.png Read Tilda Swinton Channels Her Ancestors https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/13401592-697c-4136-ba4a-16d37c913a93/Screen+Shot+2024-05-06+at+17.15.36.png Read Gardens of Good and Evil https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/abd48df7-41ea-4414-9e22-6b26c586a218/Screenshot+2026-01-13+at+16.05.22.png Read A Fold in Time: Aperture https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/ef88ea0d-0d76-44d3-8f7b-4c0f3d249e67/Screen+Shot+2024-04-26+at+07.53.38.png Read Olivia Laing's garden of love https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/1f46bf3f-f9e9-451e-a666-e3312cfa97d0/Screenshot+2025-10-08+at+17.24.12.png Read The Art of Gardening https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/5d7aeaf5-06e0-476a-bb06-25f56d3a5c40/Screenshot+2025-06-05+at+12.31.11.png Read Edmund White remembered https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/01f9245a-7e32-46b6-b965-976639a9ba2b/Screen+Shot+2024-10-25+at+09.48.07.png Read A Garden Manifesto interview https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/6d70521b-dfe1-4b14-ab14-e38688bfa2d9/Screenshot+2025-09-06+at+15.47.30.png Read Olivia Laing on Hilma af Klint and the Language of Gardens https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/7122864b-2a1b-4a4d-9377-0d962a54bcd8/Screenshot+2025-04-11+at+09.07.55.png Read Losing Time Again: Chantal Joffe, Skarstedt Paris https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/48001330-e2f1-4e73-8d33-cb512142bd02/Screen+Shot+2024-12-11+at+08.50.06.png Read In Conversation with Jamaica Kincaid https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/9fe80bb0-79a8-44d7-bfea-85cc60df1ab1/Screen+Shot+2023-09-04+at+15.01.57.png Read Chantal Joffe: The Eel https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/151411bd-0fb2-4795-ad93-a67097a8a400/Screenshot+2025-02-18+at+10.01.21.png Read Sandwiches from the Garage: Vittles https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/12245793-2956-43e0-918f-ae720093fa04/Screen+Shot+2024-05-06+at+17.12.25.png Read Bloomsbury Women https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/1ec1b4fe-751a-419d-8ce1-e8630dd736bf/Screen+Shot+2023-07-31+at+20.09.01.png Read Observer: Jarvis Cocker https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/c89f8105-89bf-46e6-92b2-740f285b2780/IMG_4482.jpg Read 'The arts stop us killing each other' https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/d25e7dee-4b1d-415d-a1ab-71f173a706a3/tumblr_2c6af6c718b3c7da4fdf61025b7805ff_eed700ed_1280.jpg Read True Detective: An Investigation https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/c73112fa-28b5-4483-9fdd-9ab58538e378/Screen+Shot+2023-08-22+at+16.57.20.png Read Granta In Conversation: Olivia Laing and M. John Harrison https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/47c97598-ca01-4a53-91e4-0432276de1be/TLS+cover.jpg Read Times Literary Supplement: Radical Barbie: Secrets and Lies in the Work of Kathy Acker https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/ce5da0b7-2358-4ce4-a804-01a075f45a84/Screen+Shot+2023-07-31+at+20.07.38.png Read World of Interiors: Cedric Morris and the Blooms of Bohemia https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/3ceec547-48bf-48a4-b696-f2382510782c/Screen+Shot+2023-07-31+at+20.10.07.png Read Observer: Group Think: Why Art Loves a Crowd https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/a263a647-d2b4-40ed-aeb0-7e6a5ea97af2/Screen+Shot+2023-07-31+at+20.09.29.png Read Fantastic Man: Neil Tennant https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/1abb85fe-8f50-4a6a-a227-872e40ea469c/Screen+Shot+2023-07-31+at+20.08.00.png Read Guardian: Did Sontag Like Women? https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/175f0226-8cd0-40e3-a94a-ad76669b72ea/Screen+Shot+2022-02-15+at+12.19.59.png Read Observer: John Berger's Ways of Seeing at 50 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/231c4286-1db5-45f7-afc6-57b111d17752/TGC001-COVER-IMAGE.jpg Read Guardian: The Books of my Life https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/c2347de7-c931-4461-9736-4092b79c8a64/Screen+Shot+2024-01-25+at+08.13.05.png Read Missing Persons by Clair Wills https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/1690831142668-X017QPMFO3PLYN721FZ7/Screen%2BShot%2B2023-07-31%2Bat%2B20.07.13.jpg Read Guardian: Love Me Tender by Constance Debre https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/71a1ee29-cd7a-45bf-a64c-49b63f773430/Screen+Shot+2023-08-01+at+09.19.41.png Read Times Literary Supplement: The good life? Considering modern utopias https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/a88bc39d-df32-4005-81d9-c850b31c5fbf/370706.jpg Read Tove Jansson https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/a7016ca4-4301-4d62-b139-8636a0f2e28f/248MAG059_Laing-Lange-HR-1636x2048.jpg Read Aperture: To Show Our World Now https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/1641301983826-62KWHDKM2KPT96MDG4D8/Edward_Hopper-Nighthawks-1942.jpg Read New York Times: How To Be Lonely https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/7261b395-c1c4-40cd-a357-007e408b8843/Screen+Shot+2023-08-10+at+15.05.25.png Read Guardian: Wifedom by Anna Funder https://www.olivialaing.com/watch daily 0.75 2025-11-11 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/d664ddc0-347d-480c-8464-8be68b2fbfc2/IMG_3049.JPG https://www.olivialaing.com/listen daily 0.75 2025-07-20 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/25e250ad-10b0-487c-822a-8844c672ac6b/TheSilverBook_B3.jpg Listen RTE Arena https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/888861fa-ae60-4c26-9225-5dd978a4ca1c/IMG_5410+copy.JPG Listen Radio 4 Front Row on Pasolini https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/f491bd8f-b92b-46b8-bcf2-12f8b209df10/IMG_7038.jpg Listen Hatchard's podcast on The Silver Book https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/cb4398f9-372d-4279-a9f8-9ee7b0ea682d/GetImage.jpg Listen Radio 4: Great Lives on Christopher Lloyd https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/1d4fb73b-3be4-4f08-ac28-45d4ef5ba06f/Screen+Shot+2024-06-23+at+15.27.31.png Listen Radio 3: Private Passions https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/277b4a4a-bf2e-41b0-a26e-c1e9d5a432f8/nk7d4tf6luy81.jpg Listen Radio 4: Arthur Russell: Vanished into Music https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/618338fc-60e9-49c3-b28c-aef88280dd42/IMG_2603.jpg Listen Time Sensitive podcast https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/dac3f478-ae25-4df9-82a8-844b7b37d8f9/91639%402x.jpg Listen Radio 4 Viewfinders: Giovanni di Paolo https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/1641314059081-VN394SK25MFF6X2EF497/1.jpg Listen London Review Bookshop on Crudo with Ali Smith https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/c35acc35-b29e-461d-80da-781194115df6/Screen+Shot+2024-06-04+at+08.19.12.png Listen Radio 4: Start the Week with Robin Wall Kimmerer and Olivia Laing https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/a3eeee9e-ca53-4fca-ba36-32be97408f4b/Screen+Shot+2023-07-31+at+20.33.00.png Listen MoMA podcast on David Wojnarowicz and the Power of Art https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/61cea158-cc0c-41a6-92dc-7fb134195c23/Screen+Shot+2023-08-01+at+10.20.19.png Listen Radio 4 Start the Week: Art in an Emergency https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/1690837268961-2DQLTKO8SK5CEK5ECRGZ/Screen%2BShot%2B2021-06-29%2Bat%2B18.49.09.jpg Listen Talk Art Live at Hay Festival https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/b2540972-045a-4296-805a-be0dc1426322/Screen+Shot+2023-07-31+at+21.56.52.png Listen London Review Bookshop podcast: Olivia Laing and Celia Paul https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/eb25e411-33a0-4470-b135-6b8d62399a00/merlin_142712643_54d8f3fb-64b7-434a-a9b6-ad6c13df05de-superJumbo.jpg Listen The Great Women Artists: Olivia Laing on Ana Mendieta, Sarah Lucas and Chantal Joffe https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/79366d32-8ee5-4d0e-9487-dcfca946c1f6/p0837lgs.jpg Listen Radio 4 Only Artists: Chantal Joffe and Olivia Laing https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/91653a48-05fe-49a8-ae41-f989408332f7/p0lv0w5b.jpg.webp Listen Radio 4: What Happened to the Counter Culture? https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/ca31bf2d-43c1-4a4f-a439-3133fee5b6fe/Screen+Shot+2024-03-12+at+06.18.56.png Listen Open Book: Daphne du Maurier https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/603f2873-c0fa-497d-a3a2-324fc2aad7dd/Screen+Shot+2022-02-08+at+09.40.49.png Listen Radio 4 Front Row on Louise Bourgeois https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/7e7c7f96-b9f6-444e-8689-01af7cd4941a/Bad_Blood_%28Sage_book%29.jpg Listen Radio 4 A Good Read https://www.olivialaing.com/the-garden-against-time daily 0.75 2025-12-02 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/c61b130f-c85b-4e80-8485-3c3ea1660294/Garden+Against+Time+PBB+Cover+New2.jpg The Garden Against Time ‘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 was interconnected, wide open to the world…’ In 2020, Olivia Laing began to restore a walled garden in Suffolk, an overgrown Eden of unusual plants. The work drew her into an exhilarating investigation of paradise and its long association with gardens. 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. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/452cfcff-5022-40b8-a111-fabcea8dcfe8/Screen+Shot+2023-09-18+at+08.25.43.png The Garden Against Time Order in the UK: Amazon, Blackwell’s, Bookshop.org, Donlon, Foyles, London Review Bookshop, Waterstones (signed), WH Smith, Wordery Order in the US: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million, Bookshop Read: FT essay, Guardian extract, New York Times essay, House and Garden feature, Irish Times interview, Independent interview, MoMA interview Listen: R3 Private Passions, R4 Start the Week, RTE Arena, Spectator podcast, Worms podcast, Intelligence Squared, Digging with Flo Images of the garden: here Publicity: sam@sam-talbot.com UK press/events: emma.bravo@macmillan.com Translation: Italian, German, Spanish, Polish, Russian, Ukranian, Korean Coming soon: Finnish, Swedish, Danish, French, Taiwanese ‘This isn’t a historical survey of gardening, much less a practical guide, so much as an inquiry into the idea of the garden — its history and poetics, its relationship to sex, imagination and power. Laing belongs in an as-yet-undefined and perhaps undefinable class of prose artists who blend feeling and analysis, speculation and research, wit and instruction as they track down the elusive patterns and inescapable contradictions of modern experience.’ New York Times ‘Buzzing and epic…like all Laing’s works, this one is a joyful expansion on the meaning of the subject it undertakes… The history of gardens and gardening is a fascinating subject, but The Garden Against Time asks for more. Laing seeks a communal space where we can cherish what is most beautiful about being alive. The possiblities are what matter.’ Washington Post ‘The kind of book that will continue to bloom in the minds of readers as it ages, revealing new connections each time it’s picked up…In a time of forced binaries and ubiquitous oversimplification in mainstream culture and public thought, I’m thankful for seekers like Laing, those who insist upon the possibility of more lush, reciprocal entanglements between people and the land.’ Los Angeles Review of Books ‘Could we make the world a better place? How exquisite to hold a book that makes me believe so.’ Financial Times ‘The Garden Against Time, despite its darker subtexts, feels like a recuperative work.’ Irish Times ‘A sharp and enthralling memoir of the garden’s contradiction: dream and reality, life and death, the fascination of cultivation and the political horrors that it can disguise.’ Neil Tennant ‘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, The Kitchen Diaries ‘No one writes with more energy and ecstasy than Olivia Laing. This book is what we need right now: paradise, regained.’ Philip Hoare, RisingTideFallingStar ‘Laing probes important questions about land ownership and exclusion and the human drive to create paradise on earth. All the while, her elegant prose bewitches and beguiles. A truly wonderful read.’ Sue Stuart-Smith, The Well-Gardened Mind ‘Olivia Laing is a marvellous writer. So prepare yourself to be enchanted.’ Jilly Cooper https://www.olivialaing.com/the-garden-against-time-tour daily 0.75 2024-05-06 https://www.olivialaing.com/the-silver-book daily 0.75 2026-03-02 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/6c09ab78-b37f-41fd-8d3d-7e8f8bdd5c71/TheSilverBook_PB.jpg The Silver Book ‘It is dangerous to want someone this much. He has always known it, from the very first night…’ It is September 1974 and two men meet by chance in Venice. One is a young English artist, in panicked flight from London. The other is Danilo Donati, the magician of Italian cinema, the designer responsible for realising the spectacular visions of Fellini and Pasolini. Donati is in Venice to produce sketches for Fellini’s Casanova. A young – and beautiful – apprentice is just what he needs. He sweeps Nicholas to Rome, into the looking-glass world of Cinecittà, the studio where Casanova’s Venice will be ingeniously assembled. Then in the spring, the lovers move together to the set of Salò, Pasolini’s horrifying fable of fascism. But Nicholas has a secret and in this world of constant illusion, his real nature passes unseen. Amidst the rising tensions of Italy’s ‘Years of Lead’, he acts as an accelerant, setting in motion a tragedy he didn’t intend. The Silver Book is at once a queer love story and a noirish thriller, set in the dream factory of cinema. It’s a fictional account of real things, and an investigation into the difficult relationship between artifice and truth, illusion and reality, love and power. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601ea890beed354b4e2f2a02/7f60dc2a-ae46-4dd6-a4e5-18a44954fc9d/TheSilverBook_Approved_CVR+copy.jpg The Silver Book Events: here Essays: Guardian: Pasolini - a warning from history, Financial Times: Danilo Donati, the secret magician of Italian cinema, Harpers Bazaar Italia: Giallo Italiano, Frieze: Ideal Syllabus, Vogue: Olivia Laing’s Rome, LitHub: The Power of Illusion Interviews: Irish Times, The Nerve, Publishers Weekly, A Rabbit’s Foot, Another Magazine, LitHub Extracts: Bomb, Harper’s Magazine Listen: Radio 4 Front Row, RTE Arena, Hatchard’s podcast Publicity: sam@sam-talbot.com UK press & events: CDavies1@penguinrandomhouse.co.uk US press: sarita.varma@fsgbooks.com Foreign rights: margaret@pewliterary.com Film rights: emily@theartistspartnership.com Coming soon: German, Spanish, Ukrainian, Polish ‘Sublime… where the book really soars is in its visceral portrait of Italian renegade filmmaking… [Laing’s} unsentimental style brings the 1970s Italian cinema scene to vivid life, making the work of Pasolini and Fellini feel fresh, daring and urgent.’ New York Times ‘A novel of stunning imaginative power…rigorously researched yet highly inventive’ Spectator ‘You do not need to be an expert on postwar Italian cinema or politics (or to know the true crime story unfolding here) to savour this novel. Laing describes the filming in dazzling clarity. 1970s Rome swaggers from the page.’ Times “An arresting narrative about art, filmmaking, and desire in 1970s Italy… Shimmery and dreamlike, The Silver Book lives up to the promise of its name.’ Los Angeles Review of Books ‘Unabashedly queer and unapologetically erotic… Laing’s strength as a biographer and historian makes The Silver Book sing on a deeper level; their lush, beautiful prose is backed by meticulous research... In our own era of rising fascism, of increasing violence and conservatism, Laing’s novel feels eerily timely.’ Art in America ‘a technical tour de force… prose that pares down and transforms the messiness of the real into sentence after sentence of unforced lucidity’ Times Literary Supplement ‘A beautiful, terrifying, wonderful work of fiction’ Pittsburgh Post-Gazette ‘Laing’s vibrant depiction of both real and imagined events is a prescient exploration of the meaning of art in dangerous places.’ Washington Post ‘A transportive, hot-blooded book, flooded by Roman light, sticky heat, and scooter exhaust—and a potent tribute to the fierce, uncompromising vision of Pasolini, whose dark warnings have come home to roost fifty years later.’ AnOther Magazine ‘Anyone familiar with Laing's exquisite nonfiction work… will be unsurprised by the unforced lyricism of their latest novel, a shimmering work that is part love story, part thriller… Essentially, it’s a cautionary tale against fascism.’ Booklist ‘A mesmerizing, contemplative, and haunting work of historical fiction’ – Kirkus Review ‘Erotic and compelling, Laing’s novel offers an intoxicating look at the people, emotions and exquisite but often bitter details behind the dream-making machinery of Italian cinema.’ BookPage ‘One of the most incisive literary voices working today, Laing writes about art, sex, identity, alienation, politics, and the environment… [This] dazzling novel, which seamlessly mixes real life figures and fictional characters… spotlights queer life in ’70s Italy and considers the sacrifices that artists make in pursuit of their vision’ - Publishers Weekly ‘Entrancing... a shimmering elegy for these filmmakers and a revolutionary era in cinematic history’ - Air Mail ‘Like the script of an unwritten movie, voyeuristic, slick with 1970s decadence, glittering with shadows and unspoken sins, Olivia Laing’s The Silver Book is lush, intense, wildly evocative; subtly freighted with emotional power and sensuality, it is simply their best book yet’ – Philip Hoare ‘An enchanted tale of an accursed era’ – Lucy Sante ‘Mercurial, voluptuous, and knowing, Olivia Laing’s The Silver Book is at once a portrait of Rome at a volatile moment, with la dolce vita turning sour and the dreaded ‘Years of Lead’ on the horizon, and a love-letter to 70s Italian cinema, with a tight focus on Pasolini, its elegiac heart. Vibrant on so many levels, from the intellectual to the carnal and the poetic, The Silver Book will have you in a trance from the first page to the last. How can the novel possibly be dead when Laing is writing as beautifully as this?’ – Rupert Thomson ‘Transporting, heartbreaking, beautiful. I did not want this story to end’ – Nigel Slater ‘The Silver Book is an astounding work. It’s difficult to believe this isn’t an eyewitness account: the characters appear to live and breathe in actual time, and we experience with them all the erotic tensions, as well as the tragedies, involved in their defiant pursuit of beauty. The world of Fellini and Pasolini is uncannily resurrected in this visionary narrative’ – Celia Paul ‘Such a haunting, sad but creatively thrilling tale told with delicate economy’ – Neil Tennant ‘By taking us on set during the filming of two of the strangest movies ever made, Olivia Laing’s new novel makes us wonder all over again at how facts can be turned into fiction, then back once again into glittering and suggestive fact. A love story dedicated to cinema, to queerness, and to the alchemy of all good art’ – Neil Bartlett ‘This is a novel to fall in love with—a canny hustler of a novel, brilliant, obsessive, hot, and yet it is also like the light on the water at night in Venice… And it is the work of an artist at the height of their powers, as if I could admire Laing more.’ – Alexander Chee https://www.olivialaing.com/silver-book-tour daily 0.75 2025-11-03