'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 ho...

'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 ho...