Alone cover art

Alone

On different ways of living

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Alone

By: Daniel Schreiber, Ben Fergusson - translator
Narrated by: Robert Strange
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About this listen

'A book to love and cherish'
Deborah Levy, author of The Cost of Living

'A beautiful writer and, just as important, a beautiful thinker'
Hanya Yanagihara, author of A Little Life

'Friendship is, in fact, as much the topic of this book as aloneness'
Sarah Bakewell, Guardian

At no time before have so many people lived alone, and never has loneliness been so widely or keenly felt. Why, in a society of individualists, is living alone perceived as a shameful failure? And can we ever be happy on our own?

'A heartfelt memoir on being single, living alone and the existential experience of loneliness'
Financial Times

'Romantic love, suggests the author, is the lone "grand narrative" to have survived seismic societal shifts in modern times . . . Hermits and intimacy, the taboo of loneliness and the consolation of friendship - all find their place in a meditation that nods to joy and adversity'
Observer©2021 Carl Hanser Verlag GmbH & Co. KG, München (P)2025 Hodder & Stoughton Limited
Art & Literature Authors Psychology Psychology & Mental Health Social Psychology & Interactions Sociology Heartfelt

Critic reviews

Beautifully written and elegantly constructed, Alone explores the tension between our desire for the freedom of solitude, and the draw of companionship, and questions how we might disentangle ourselves from inherited ideas about how to live. Romantic love is this relentless grand narrative in our culture but it's only one way of living - what about the grand narrative of friendship? I absolutely loved reading it. (Octavia Bright, author of This Ragged Grace)

'Oh my god, I tore through this breathtaking book! Alone is gorgeously, sensitively written and yet so explicit in its honesty and vulnerability. I connected with it deeply and personally - I truly loved it.' (Jami Attenberg, author of All This Could Be Yours)

'Daniel Schreiber has written a brave and searching vindication of single life, a book about the cultivation and tending of solitude, about solitude as an art. Amid the bewildering loss of everydayness imposed by the pandemic, when solitude was not chosen but enforced, Schreiber creates in these pages a moving conversation - with philosophers and poets, theorists and novelists - about the sources of value in our lives. By multiplying our sense of those sources, by insisting on the dignity of models of life that have sometimes been disparaged, this book finally becomes a document of liberation' (Garth Greenwell, author of Small Rain)

'An intelligent, moving, and heartfelt meditation on the mixed joys and sorrows of solitude. Schreiber's prose is gorgeous, practically silken, and he wears his erudition so lightly that he is the best possible guide on this journey to the elegant lunar landscape of aloneness.' (Lauren Groff, author of Matrix)

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