Truly fascinating.

Shaw’s debut book is a spryly paced, fun, sometimes frightening exploration of how we remember – and why everyone remembers things that never truly happened … Her book is equal parts breezy guide through the recent lessons we’ve learned about memory, and a loving tribute to the sometimes eccentric researchers who toiled away in the laboratory to uncover them … Shaw's quirky charm enlivens the book throughout.

Illuminating and instructive

Andrew Solomon is every bit as magnificent a traveler as he is a writer - in fact, it's difficult at times to determine which is the greater talent. Thankfully, the reader gets to experience both gifts throughout the pages of this deeply impressive and profoundly moving collection. Here is man whose curiosities are vast (politics, art, food, psychology, anthropology), and whose intellect is beautifully honed, but whose spirit is humble and whose heart is enormous. You will not only know the world better after having seen it through Solomon's eyes, you will also care about it more.

This is a beautiful book, inspired by love of ‘away' and uncertainty about ‘home,' a celebration of freedom which valuably warns that freedom must sometimes be learned. Much more than 'travel writing,' it's a portrait of our world, made by someone who has been there.

From Cape Town to Bucharest, and Hangzhou to Tripoli, Andrew Solomon’s Far and Away is positively Whitmanian in its openness to difficulty and its embodiment of wonder. I felt exposed and expanded. This book is an ecstatic provocation to understand ourselves not as citizens of nations but as citizens of the entire world, a world whose territories are glorious and troubled and desperately connected.

Andrew Solomon’s magisterial Far and Away collects a quarter-century of soul-shaking essays.

His writing is never less than deeply perceptive, and wonderfully humane.

Greater than the sum of its parts. It sparkles with insights great and small on the countries and people that [Andrew Solomon] has had the privilege to meet over the last quarter century. Although his perceptions are keen, what he delivers best and with enchanting clarity are their truths, fears, regrets, and hopes. Readers will most certainly be inspired to book a flight, finishing this book en route to some faraway place.

Solomon’s writing captures the sweep of history and social upheaval through vivid, fine-grained reportage that’s raptly attuned to individual experience.

Agile, informative, even revelatory pieces that, together, show us both the great variety of humanity and the interior of a gifted writer’s heart.

Far and Away is literary journalism at its cracking best.

The pieces, covering 25 years, are brilliant…models of unsparing lucidity and trenchant observation.

One of the most original thinkers of our time.

Solomon is an attentive and inquisitive anatomist of the ways that art is made within a society.

Solomon has an outsider’s eagle eye. A dazzling volume.

[A] wonderful collection of essays… Dip in and out, and you will be richly rewarded over and again.

This is a book to open the eyes and broaden the mind.

As always, Solomon gets into the far corners of things, including people’s minds… He’s also very sharp on South Africa, China, Libya, Romania, and Brexit Britain, among others. He’s an expert on turmoil.