Leaving Home cover art

Leaving Home

A Memoir in Full Colour

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Leaving Home

Written by: Mark Haddon
Narrated by: Mark Haddon
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About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin.

Simultaneously heart-breaking and darkly hilarious, Leaving Home is a portrait of the artist both as a child and as an adult.

Mark Haddon's 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 Mark 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 how art, in all its varied forms, provides a way of understanding and coming to terms with the mess of human life. And it’s richly illustrated throughout with images from the author’s childhood.

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' Sarah Perry, author of Enlightenment

© Mark Haddon 2026 (P) Penguin Audio 2026

 Art & Literature Biographies of Artists, Architects & Photographers

Critic Reviews

'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'
'Really extraordinary book. Painful, funny, beautifully illustrated. Nobody does it quite like Mark Haddon'
'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'
'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'
'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.'
'This book is beautiful and surprising and thought-provoking and sad and lovely and various other things - you should read it'
There is much to savour about the inside life of such a creative mind… Haddon has written a highly captivating book about escape, survival and the problems of processing a torrid past
Leaving Home…brims with anxiety, empathy and a kind of zinging, cleansing innocence… [delivered] with humour and wincing honesty
A brutally unsparing childhood memoir
[A] blistering memoir… an incredibly detailed, painful, funny, horrifying and exhilarating record of how to live beside what has happened
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