Olivia Laing

‘I couldn’t put it down’ Sally Rooney, author of Normal PeopleKathy is a writer. Kathy is getting married. It’s the summer of 2017 and the whole world is falling apart. Kathy spends the first summer of her forties trying to adjust to making a lifelong commitment – marriage. But it’s not only Kathy who is changing. Political, social and natural landscapes are all in peril. Fascism is on the rise, truth is dead, the planet is 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 it could all end at any momen? rom a Tuscan hotel for the super-rich to a politically-paralysed UK, Olivia Laing’s first novel is a love letter, inspired by the life and work of Kathy Acker. It is a blistering rewire of the form and a brilliant, funny and emphatically raw account of love in the apocalypse. ‘Will blow you away’ Deborah Levy, author of Hot MilkWinner of the James Tait Black Prize for FictionShortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize and the Gordon Burn Prize

'Wonderful and necessary' ANNE ENRIGHT ~ 'Constantly surprising' GUARDIAN ~ 'Stunning' DEBORAH LEVY ~ 'Compulsively fascinating' NEW STATESMAN ~ 'Beautiful' HANYA YANAGIHARA ~ 'Daring and seductive NEW YORK TIMES ~ 'Profound, unclassifiable' GARTH GREENWELL ~ 'Exhilarating' INDEPENDENT ~ 'Continually unexpected' PETER CAREY ~ 'Triumphant' TELEGRAPH ~ 'Luminously wise' HELEN MACDONALD ~ 'Unusually brave' THE TIMESWhen Olivia Laing moved to New York City in her mid-thirties, she found herself inhabiting loneliness on a daily basis. Increasingly fascinated by this most shameful of experiences, she began to explore the lonely city by way of some of its most compelling artists, illuminating loneliness in a whole new light. The Lonely City is a celebration of that strange and lovely state, intrinsic to the very act of being alive. Hailed as 'a new kind of literature' when it was first published and selling over two hundred thousand copies, Olivia Laing's dazzling book has been beloved by readers all over the world. Now, in this tenth anniversary edition, Laing reflects in a new afterword on how our experience of loneliness has changed over the course of a difficult decade.

Queer love story meets true crime thriller in the dream factory of 1970s cinema, from the award-winning, bestselling author. Perfect for readers of André Aciman's Call Me By Your Name and Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr Ripley. SHORTLISTED FOR BLACKWELL’S BOOK OF THE YEAR 2025A NEW YORK MAGAZINE TOP TEN BOOK OF THE YEAR 2025RUNNER-UP FOR THE TADEUSZ BRADECKI PRIZE 2026‘Sublime’ The New York Times'Brilliant' Olly Alexander‘It is dangerous to want someone this much. He has always known it, from the very first night.’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, 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 Cinecitta, the studio where Casanova’s Venice will be ingeniously assembled. Then in the spring, the lovers move together to the set of Salo, 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. Stylish and seductive, The Silver Book is an absorbing fictional account of real things, and an investigation into the difficult relationship between artifice and truth, illusion and reality, love and power. Praise for The Silver Book:‘Seamlessly inserts a fictional narrative into a real historical world . . . a gripping novel that is, in many ways, a technical tour de force’ Times Literary Supplement ‘A great chronicler of male genius, sexuality, loneliness and madness’ Observer‘Unabashedly queer and unapologetically erotic’ Art in America'My favourite novel of last year' M. John Harrison‘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’ The Times ‘Laing’s vibrant depiction of both real and imagined events is a prescient exploration of the meaning of art in dangerous places’ Washington Post

‘It is dangerous to want someone this much. He has always known it, from the very first night.’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, 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 Cinecitta, the studio where Casanova’s Venice will be ingeniously assembled. Then in the spring, the lovers move together to the set of Salo, 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.

Queer love story meets true crime thriller in the dream factory of 1970s cinema, from the award-winning, bestselling author. Perfect for readers of André Aciman's Call Me By Your Name and Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr Ripley. SHORTLISTED FOR BLACKWELL'S BOOK OF THE YEAR 2025 A NEW YORK MAGAZINE TOP TEN BOOK OF THE YEAR 2025 'Sublime' The New York Times 'It is dangerous to want someone this much. He has always known it, from the very first night.' 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, 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 Cinecitta, the studio where Casanova's Venice will be ingeniously assembled. Then in the spring, the lovers move together to the set of Salo, 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. Stylish and seductive, The Silver Book is an absorbing fictional account of real things, and an investigation into the difficult relationship between artifice and truth, illusion and reality, love and power.

Inspired by the restoration of her own garden, "imaginative and empathetic critic" (NPR) Olivia Laing embarks on an exhilarating investigation of paradise. In 2020, Olivia Laing began to restore an eighteenth-century walled garden in Suffolk, an overgrown Eden of unusual plants. The work brought to light a crucial question for our age: Who gets to live in paradise, and how can we share it while there’s still time? 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.

‘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 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.

Keď sa Olivia Laing presťahovala do New Yorku, ocitla sa v priestore osamelosti. Tejto zahanbujúcej skúsenosti sa spoločnosť vyhýba ako moru, ale ju začala fascinovať a rozhodla sa „mesto osamelosti“ skúmať prostredníctvom výtvarného umenia. Vo svojej knihe sa prechádza New Yorkom, dielami a životmi Edwarda Hoppera, Andyho Warhola, Davida Wojnarowicza či Henryho Dargera a poskytuje živý obraz toho, čo znamená byť sám a osamelý. Neskúma len príčiny tohto stavu a jeho prejavy, ale aj spôsob, ako mu vzdorovať a ako sa z osamelosti vymaniť.

Keď sa Olivia Laing presťahovala do New Yorku, ocitla sa v priestore osamelosti. Tejto zahanbujúcej skúsenosti sa spoločnosť vyhýba ako moru, ale ju začala fascinovať a rozhodla sa „mesto osamelosti“ skúmať prostredníctvom výtvarného umenia. Vo svojej knihe sa prechádza New Yorkom, dielami a životmi Edwarda Hoppera, Andyho Warhola, Davida Wojnarowicza či Henryho Dargera a poskytuje živý obraz toho, čo znamená byť sám a osamelý. Neskúma len príčiny tohto stavu a jeho prejavy, ale aj spôsob, ako mu vzdorovať a ako sa z osamelosti vymaniť.

Keď sa Olivia Laing presťahovala do New Yorku, ocitla sa v priestore osamelosti. Tejto zahanbujúcej skúsenosti sa spoločnosť vyhýba ako moru, ale ju začala fascinovať a rozhodla sa „mesto osamelosti“ skúmať prostredníctvom výtvarného umenia. Vo svojej knihe sa prechádza New Yorkom, dielami a životmi Edwarda Hoppera, Andyho Warhola, Davida Wojnarowicza či Henryho Dargera a poskytuje živý obraz toho, čo znamená byť sám a osamelý. Neskúma len príčiny tohto stavu a jeho prejavy, ale aj spôsob, ako mu vzdorovať a ako sa z osamelosti vymaniť.

At a moment in which basic rights are once again in danger, Olivia Laing conducts an ambitious 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, from gay rights and sexual liberation to feminism and the civil rights movement. Drawing on her own experiences in protest and travelling from Weimar Berlin to the prisons of McCarthy-era America, Laing grapples with some of the most significant and complicated figures of the past century, among them Nina Simone, Sigmund Freud, Susan Sontag and Malcolm X. Everybody is a crucial examination of the forces arranged against freedom and a celebration of how ordinary human bodies can resist oppression and reshape the world.

'Never has a publication been more timely' - Dazed 'A brave writer whose books open up fundamental questions about life and art' - Telegraph 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 their roles in our political and emotional lives. She profiles Jean-Michel Basquiat and Georgia O'Keeffe, 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 political time. We're often told art can't change anything. In Funny Weather, Laing argues that it can. It changes how we see the world, it exposes inequality, and it offers fertile new ways of living.

Shortlisted for the Goldsmith's Prize, the Gordon Burn Prize and the James Tait Black Award. Dive in to 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 UK, Kathy spends the first summer of her forties trying to adjust to making a lifelong commitment just as Trump is tweeting the world into nuclear war. 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, the planet is 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. Olivia Laing radically rewires the novel in a brilliant, funny and emphatically raw account of love in the apocalypse. A Goodbye to Berlin for the 21st century, Crudo charts in real time what it was like to live and love in the horrifying summer of 2017, from the perspective of a commitment-phobic artist who may or may not be Kathy Acker .

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 UK, Kathy spends the first summer of her 40s trying to adjust to making a lifelong commitment just as Trump is tweeting the world into nuclear war. 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, the planet is 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. Olivia Laing radically rewires the novel in a brilliant, funny and emphatically raw account of love in the apocalypse. A Goodbye to Berlin for the 21st century, Crudo charts in real time what it was like to live and love in the horrifying summer of 2017, from the perspective of a commitment-phobic peripatetic artist who may or may not be Kathy Acker . . .

When Olivia Laing moved to New York City in her mid-thirties, she found herself inhabiting loneliness on a daily basis. Increasingly fascinated by this most shameful of experiences, she began to explore the lonely city by way of art. Moving fluidly between the works and lives of some of the city's most compelling artists, Laing conducts an electric, dazzling investigation into what it means to be alone, illuminating not only the causes of loneliness but also how it might be resisted and redeemed.