Far from the Tree Parents, Children and the Search for Identity Synopsis
Winner of the Wellcome Book Prize 2014.
This is 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. It is the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for General Non-fiction and eleven other national awards. It is the winner of the Green Carnation Prize.
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
Author
About Andrew Solomon
Andrew Solomon is a journalist and lecturer of politics, culture and psychology who 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. His highly acclaimed international study of depression, The Noonday Demon won the 2001 National Book Award and was a finalist for the 2002 Pulitzer Prize. He lives with his husband and son in New York and London.
