Far From the Tree is a magisterial book from Andrew Solomon that parses diversity in its most intimate setting: the family. Solomon considers how parents navigate the world when a child is deaf, autistic, a dwarf, a criminal, a protégée, has Down Syndrome, and four other signal identities. Anisfield-Wolf Juror Steven Pinker wrote: “This is a monumental book, the kind that appears once in a decade. It could not be a better example of the literature of diversity.”
In addition to the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, Far From the Tree was honored with the National Book Critics Circle Award. Solomon’s third book, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, won the 2001 National Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
A native New Yorker, Solomon studied at Yale University, where he graduated magna cum laude in 1985, and at Jesus College, Cambridge, where he earned a master’s degree in English. He is a lecturer in psychiatry at Cornell University, and special advisor on LGBT affairs to the Yale School of Medicine’s Department of Psychiatry. His journalism appears frequently in The New Yorker, The New York Times, New York Magazine, Travel + Leisure, and Newsweek/The Daily Beast. He lives with his husband and children in Manhattan and London.
