by Sarah Becker
Celebrated author Mark Haddon is set to publish a deeply personal new book, Leaving Home: A Memoir in Full Colour, offering an unflinching look at his childhood growing up in Northampton.
The memoir will be published on 5 February 2026 and revisits Haddon’s early years in New Duston, where he lived with his parents and younger sister Fiona during the 1960s and 70s.
Best known for The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time — later adapted into a hugely successful West End production — Haddon’s latest work explores a family life marked by emotional distance, anxiety and cultural constraint.
When I interviewed Haddon in 2019 for the Northampton Chronicle & Echo, as he published The Porpoise, he spoke even then of an emotionally repressive childhood. While he was careful at the time, the sense of distance—both emotional and geographical—from his upbringing in Northampton was already evident. Leaving Home : A Memoir in Full Colour now expands on those early hints, offering a fuller, more candid account of the family dynamics that shaped him.
Haddon spent the first 15 years of his life at 288a Main Road, in what he describes as an architect-designed house featuring Scandinavian modernist touches, open-plan living spaces, teak doors and a dramatic sandstone chimney breast.
Despite the progressive design, the emotional atmosphere inside the home was far less open.
Shortly after the publication of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Haddon mentioned in an interview that he had been “an anxious and depressed child” — a comment he initially considered unremarkable. The reaction from home, however, exposed deeper tensions.
He recalls phoning his parents to discover that his mother was “crying herself to sleep and waking up crying in the morning” as a result of the remark. When he asked to speak to her directly, his father told him she was too upset to come to the phone.
Reflecting on his upbringing in Northampton, Haddon describes the world around him as culturally narrow.
“Every family we saw looked like ours, even on TV. In books, every family looked like ours. It was a very narrow world,” he writes.
The son of an architect, Haddon was the only writer in a family whose professions included cobblers, glove salesmen, factory workers and prizefighters.
“There were no writers of any kind,” he notes.
As a child, he escaped his anxieties through books — particularly science and space exploration.
“I was orbiting the moon with Frank Borman, James Lovell and William Anders,” he recalls.
Writing, however, was not encouraged at home. Haddon reveals that his parents showed little interest in his work, particularly his mother.
With a couple of minor exceptions she never spoke about it and certainly never asked questions about it,” he writes.
The only book of his she ever read was The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, shortly after its release. Her verdict was blunt.
“I thought there was too much swearing in it.
Then I had to drive around Menorca in a car with your father and it seemed quite realistic.”
Extracts from Leaving Home: A Memoir in Full Colour were recently published in The Guardian, offering a preview of a book that is candid, unsentimental and quietly devastating in its honesty.
For Haddon, the memoir is not about blame, but about understanding — revisiting the places and emotional landscapes that shaped one of Britain’s most distinctive literary voices.
Leaving Home: A Memoir in Full Colour is published by Chatto & Windus and will be available on February 5th on Amazon and in other major retail outlets.