Everybody

'Intensely moving; vital and artful' - Guardian 'A dizzying ride . . . both timely and beguiling' - Sunday Times At a moment in which basic rights are once again in danger; Olivia Laing conducts an ambitious investigation into the body and its discontents; using the life of the renegade psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich to chart a daring course through the long struggle for bodily freedom; from gay rights and sexual liberation to feminism and the civil rights movement. Drawing on her own experiences in protest and travelling from Weimar Berlin to the prisons of McCarthy-era America; Laing grapples with some of the most significant and complicated figures of the past century; among them Nina Simone; Sigmund Freud; Susan Sontag and Malcolm X. Everybody is a crucial examination of the forces arranged against freedom and a celebration of how ordinary human bodies can resist oppression and reshape the world. Longlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize 'An ambitious; absorbing achievement that will make your brain hum' - Evening Standard 'Laing's gift for weaving big ideas together with lyrical prose sets her alongside the likes of Arundhati Roy; John Berger and James Baldwin. In other words; she is among the most significant voices of our time.' - Financial Times