Far From The Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity

Description

**WINNER OF THE WELLCOME BOOK PRIZE 2014** Sometimes your child - the most familiar person of all - is radically different from you. The saying goes that the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. But what happens when it does? **WINNER OF THE WELLCOME BOOK PRIZE 2014** A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Sometimes your child - the most familiar person of all - is radically different from you. The saying goes that the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. But what happens when it does? Drawing on interviews with over three hundred families, covering subjects including deafness, dwarfs, Down's Syndrome, Autism, Schizophrenia, disability, prodigies, children born of rape, children convicted of crime and transgender people, Andrew Solomon documents ordinary people making courageous choices. Difference is potentially isolating, but Far from the Tree celebrates repeated triumphs of human love and compassion to show that the shared experience of difference is what unites us. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for General Non-fiction and eleven other national awards. Winner of the Green Carnation Prize.

Andrew Solomon is a writer and activist working on politics, culture and psychology. He writes regularly for the New Yorker, Newsweek, and the Guardian. He is a Lecturer in Psychiatry at Cornell University and Special Adviser on LGBT Affairs to Yale University's Department of Psychiatry. The Noonday Demon won the 2001 National Book Award and was a finalist for the 2002 Pulitzer Prize. His highly-acclaimed study of family, Far from the Tree won the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award for General Non-fiction, the Lukas Book Prize and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, among others. He lives with his husband and son in New York and London.

The tales Solomon returns with, of profound disability and extreme differences overcome, make it a bible of empathy and inclusion -- Cressida Connolly * Spectator * Andrew Solomon's Far From The Tree is a prodigious, illuminating book about the challenge of being a parent - especially when children are out of the ordinary -- Tim Adams * Observer * Life-affirming, thought provoking and highly readable, the book was compiled over 10 years of interviews and I found it deeply moving -- Kate Kellaway * Observer * Many accounts are desperately moving, but Solomon goes far beyond cheap pity... The book is an exquisite written study of parental love - as well as "a how-to manual for receptivity" -- Kerry Hudson * Herald * [A] magnificent study of disability and identity differences -- Susannah Meadows * New York Times * This wise book is a careful and surprising study of difference between parent and child and how it shapes our lives -- Stephen Grosz * Sunday Telegraph * For anyone struggling with decisions over parenting, it's an affirming reminder that there is no such thing as "normal" -- Femke Colborne * Big Issue in the North * Parents - especially mothers - are the heroes of this book, many of them describing with extraordinary absence of self-pity how they have coped with almost unimaginable adversity -- Dominic Lawson * Sunday Times * Solomon really makes you think... Uniquely brilliant -- William Leith * Evening Standard * Beautiful * The Times *