Olivia Laing isn’t easily put into a box. A mercurial master of an author of fiction and non-fiction, she has a literary sleight of hand that means, while appearing to write about one thing, she manages to make us think of much, much more. A walk along the banks of the Ouse in the footsteps of Virginia Woolf (To the River) becomes a treatise on the way history is woven into landscapes, for instance; her musings on subjects such alcoholism (The Trip to Echo Spring) or solitude (The Lonely City) become philosophical studies of human experience, simultaneously expansive and personal. In these journeys of discovery, Olivia plucks out the threads that connect us all and gently tugs.
That her home in Suffolk – “near enough to the sea to drive home in a wet swimsuit” – is not so readily categorised perhaps comes as no surprise. She describes it as “a muddly sort of one”: a Georgian house made out of two Tudor cottages, “with some excellent 1960s additions that let in the light”. It’s in here that she writes, lately while thinking about what’s outside – no prizes for guessing which earthly delights have informed Olivia’s new book, The Garden Against Time, published May 2024.
