Biography & True Stories
Description
In the turbulent late seventies, six-year-old Susanna Crossman moved with her mother and siblings from a suburban terrace to a crumbling mansion deep in the English countryside. They would share their new home with over fifty other residents from all over the world, armed with worn paperbacks on ecology, Marx and radical feminism, drawn together by utopian dreams of remaking the world. They did not leave for fifteen years. Decades later, and armed with hindsight, Crossman revisits her past, turning to leading thinkers in philosophy, sociology and anthropology to examine the society she grew up in, and the many meanings of family and home. In this luminous memoir, she asks what happens to children who are raised as the product of social experiments and explores how growing up estranged from the outside world shapes her as a parent today.
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Rights Information
North America: Craig Literary
Translation rights for Craig Literary: Joanna Kaliszewska joanna@thebksagency.com
Marketing Information
A Guardian Book to Look Out For in 2024
Serialized in the Guardian – a 6-page feature that was #1 most read in the Lifestyle section and #5 across the entire Guardian (weekend of Aug 10, 2024)
A Bookseller Editor’s Choice and a LoveReading Star Book
The Bookseller, Library Focus 2024: Librarians share what they are looking forward to and expect to be popular in the coming months. “It’s going to be huge. Devastatingly candid, supremely smart and wide-ranging in its references, but also very accessible.”
The Bookseller, Books in the Media (12/8/24): critics turn to memoirs by Susanna Crossman and Moon Unit Zappa
Best New Books to Read in August 2024, iweekend - “Crossman’s extraordinary memoir of the tyranny of her childhood is heartbreaking, eye-opening and difficult to put down.”
Endorsements
“Intellectual and intensely personal at once, this is essential reading for anyone who has considered alternatives to the nuclear family.” Helen McClory, author of The Goldblum Variations
“Beautiful, Bold, Tender. I loved this gorgeous memoir about making home.”Pragya Agarwal, author of Hysterical
“Brave and beautifully written. An extraordinary anxiety-inducing dive into life in a late-70s/80s utopia, told through a child's eyes. Be careful what you wish for...” Allan Jenkins, author of Plot 29
“Crossman is strikingly good on how children pay the price for adult utopian fantasies, as props and as scapegoats.” Noreen Masud, author of A Flat Place
“She writes with such curiosity and heart-breaking honesty of what it is to find her own truth. I was enthralled by this book.” Lily Dunn, author of Sins of My Father
“A bold and intimate grappling with the hidden history at the heart of a childhood that was set up as a collectivist social experiment. A true piece of work and one that is historically significant.” Ewan Morrison, award-winning author of How to Survive Everything and Nina X
“A brilliant memoir - a touching, propulsive and shocking portrayal of a childhood in a utopian community, framed by a fascinating exploration of what it means to create a space called home.” Sam Mills, author of The Fragments of My Father
Reviews
“Vivid and painfully honest…There’s something of a Deborah Levy sensibility here. It’s serious and poetic. It’s delicate and wise. It’s a multilayered excavation, a rich but also careful unfolding of the truth.” The Sunday Times
“Fascinating…vivid and poignant details make Home Is Where We Start a powerful memoir of a particularly unusual childhood.” The Observer
“I hugely admire Crossman’s resistance against the tyranny of it all – and her constant will to survive…Throughout the book she interrogates utopian ideas, as well as sharing insights from psychological research, philosophical thinking and her therapeutic practice.” the i newspaper
“Ambitious…Compelling…The diarist’s sense of urgency and the child’s creative use of language have stayed with her, often producing vivid prose”. Financial Times
Author Biography
Susanna Crossman grew up in an international utopian community in England during the 1970s and 80s. Now based in France, she works internationally as a writer, clinical arts therapist, and lecturer. Her writing has featured in British Vogue, Aeon the Paris Review. She is winner of the Lovereading Short Story Award 2019. She lives in Brittany with her husband and three daughters. She is a published novelist in French, and regularly collaborates with artists.
Craig Literary
Craig Literary, founded by Jessica Craig in 2016, is a full-service literary agency representing diverse writers of fiction, non-fiction, and children's books. The agency grows out of Jessica Craig's 20+ years of experience as a top foreign rights agent and on her record as an effective international champion of high quality authors, from established names to outstanding debuts, and across genres in fiction and non-fiction.
View all titlesBibliographic Information
- Publisher/Imprint Penguin / Fig Tree
- Publication Date August 2024
- Orginal LanguageEnglish
- ISBN/Identifier 0241650909
- Publication Country or regionUnited Kingdom
- FormatHardback
- Pages400
- ReadershipGeneral
- Publish StatusPublished
- Copyright Year2024
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