Alone

This is a book to love and to cherish. Daniel Schreiber is such a skilled and engaging writer. Without sentimentality, he digs into the taboo subject of loneliness - societal, personal, existential; the salvation of hiking, the many dimensions of friendship, the solace of literature, the value of kindness, the pleasures of solitude. You will meet Nietzsche, Sappho, Arendt - and perhaps you will meet yourself, walking in the hills, thinking about new ways to live.

Beautifully written and elegantly constructed, Alone explores the tension between our desire for the freedom of solitude, and the draw of companionship, and questions how we might disentangle ourselves from inherited ideas about how to live. Romantic love is this relentless grand narrative in our culture but it's only one way of living - what about the grand narrative of friendship? I absolutely loved reading it.

The most moving, memorable books are the ones that attempt to answer questions that the author has been struggling with for his entire life. In Alone, Daniel Schreiber - a beautiful writer and, just as important, a beautiful thinker - explores the questions of not just his life, but our age: Who am I if no one loves me? What are the limits of friendship? How does one live with deep and profound loneliness? This is a book for not just this year, but this era

Blends passages of memoir with scholarly and literary references to explore the author's existence as a single gay man who often feels he is living outside standard social models . . . Friendship is, in fact, as much the topic of this book as aloneness. Schreiber writes interestingly about it, drawing a contrast between its polymorphic freedoms and the 'grand narratives' of love and family . . . Alone follows a "small" spirit itself; it takes only brief dips into its sources, and does not drive towards any climactic answer . . . Beautiful images and insights bounce up along the way. - Guardian

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.