Far from the Tree: Young Adult Edition--How Children and Their Parents Learn to Accept One Another . . . Our Differences Unite Us

From New York Times bestselling author Andrew Solomon comes a stunning, poignant, and affecting young adult edition of his award-winning masterpiece, Far from the Tree, which explores the impact of extreme differences between parents and children.

The old adage says that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, meaning that children usually resemble their parents. But what happens when the apples fall somewhere else—sometimes a couple of orchards away, sometimes on the other side of the world?

In this young adult edition, Andrew Solomon profiles how families accommodate children who have a variety of differences: families of people who are deaf, who are dwarfs, who have Down syndrome, who have autism, who have schizophrenia, who have multiple severe disabilities, who are prodigies, who commit crimes, and more.

Elegantly reported by a spectacularly original and compassionate thinker, Far From the Tree explores how people who love each other must struggle to accept each other—a theme in every family’s life. The New York Times calls the adult edition a “wise and beautiful” volume that “will shake up your preconceptions and leave you in a better place.”

Andrew Solomon is a writer and lecturer on psychology, politics, and the arts and a professor of clinical medical psychology (in psychiatry) at Columbia University Medical Center. He is the author of Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and named one of The New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century; The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, winner of the National Book Award and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change; A Stone Boat; and The Irony Tower: Soviet Artists in a Time of Glasnost. A former president of PEN America, Solomon is an activist in LGBTQ+ rights, mental health, and the arts, and his TED talks have been viewed more than twenty-seven million times. He lives in New York and London. For more information, visit the author’s website at AndrewSolomon.com.

Laurie Calkhoven is the author of many books, including George Washington: An American Life and Harriet Tubman: Leading the Way to Freedom. She lives in New York City. Visit her at LaurieCalkhoven.com.