Leaving Home
A Memoir in Full Colour
Published on 5. February 2026
Book
Hardback
224 pages
978-1-78474-623-0 (ISBN)
Description
'Tender, transporting, creative and beautifully written ... Simply glorious, from start to finish' Rachel Clarke, author of Dear Life
As an artist and writer, Mark Haddon has always created vivid and unforgettable images. Now he takes his own life as raw material, writing about growing up in the cultural wastelands of the English Midlands of the 1960s and 70s.
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 mache 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 unforgiveable 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.
'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
As an artist and writer, Mark Haddon has always created vivid and unforgettable images. Now he takes his own life as raw material, writing about growing up in the cultural wastelands of the English Midlands of the 1960s and 70s.
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 mache 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 unforgiveable 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.
'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
Reviews / Votes
'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 * '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 * '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 *More details
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Vintage Publishing
Dimensions
Height: 237 mm
Width: 165 mm
Thickness: 30 mm
Weight
695 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-78474-623-0 (9781784746230)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
E-Book
02/2026
Vintage Digital
€14.99
Available for download
Person
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).