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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 mâché 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 unforgivable 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.

'Tender, transporting, creative and beautifully written ... Simply glorious, from start to finish' Rachel Clarke, author of Dear Life

'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

© Mark Haddon 2026 (P) Penguin Audio 2026