Alone
On different ways of living
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Alone
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Narrated by:
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Robert Strange
About this listen
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?
Drawing on personal experience, as well as philosophy and sociology, Daniel Schreiber explores the tension between the desire for solitude and freedom, and for companionship, intimacy and love. Along the way he illuminates the role that friendships play in our lives - can they be a response to the loss of meaning in a world in crisis? A profoundly enlightening book, Alone explores how we want to live.©2025 Daniel Schreiber (P)2025 Hodder & Stoughton Limited
Critic reviews
'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)