Mark Haddon is best known as the author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003), a huge hit that won prizes for both adult and children’s fiction. In his new book, Leaving Home: A Memoir in Full Colour (Chatto & Windus 224pp £25), he takes his own life as raw material, revisiting his early years and creating something wholly original. It is clear from the start that his was not a happy childhood – and his sister’s was perhaps even more unhappy: the book begins with her waking from a nightmare in which her father is chasing her with a knife. This terrifying dream was to recur for the next forty-five years. Haddon had his own nightmares, and a range of phobias that included an extreme fear of flying and abject terror of death. He was ‘an anxious and depressed child’; looking back on his early days, he feels ‘a wave of what can’t properly be called nostalgia because the last thing I’d want is to return to that age and those places where I was often profoundly unhappy and from which I’d have been desperate to escape if escape had been a possibility’. 

It is surprising, then, that this memoir – peppered with illustrations, many of them by the author – is so tender. It is also disarmingly honest and, in places, very funny.

At the heart of the story, and of Haddon’s troubles, are his dysfunctional parents. His mother in particular is memorably monstrous, showing almost no sign of affection for her children or husband, and cultivating a magnificent array of prejudices against, to name but a few, women bus drivers, beards, tattoos