The author of The Lonely City takes readers on an ambitious investigation into the body in the twentieth century, using the life of the renegade psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich to chart an electrifying course through the great freedom movements of the era, from gay rights and sexual liberation to feminism and the civil-rights movement.

'Intensely moving, vital and artful' – Guardian
'A dizzying ride . . . both timely and beguiling' – Sunday Times

From the award-winning author of Crudo, this is an exhilarating and eminently readable study of 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.

At a time when basic rights are once again in danger, 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

'Sets her alongside the likes of Arundhati Roy, John Berger and James Baldwin' – Financial Times

"An ambitious, absorbing achievement that will make your brain hum, like going on a funfair ride with a very clever friend" - 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

"Laing’s impassioned commitment to the promise of bodily freedom, of every body’s right to move and feel and love without harming or being harmed, shines through every sentence of the book . . . The theme is amplified by reflective vignettes of her own bodily experiences, woven into the book with a deftness, candour and generosity that readers of The Lonely City and The Trip to Echo Spring will immediately recognise . . . Yet Laing’s Reichian utopianism, with its ultimate horizon of a body without fear, coexists with a clear-eyed sense, at work in all its granular explorations of sexual politics, art and ideas, of how and why that horizon seems always to be vanishing. And this tension, between defiant hope and sober realism, only enriches her intensely moving, vital and artful book" - Guardian

"Laing is a truly thrilling thinker, with an impressively roving intellectual eye" - Telegraph

"Radically subversive" - The Times Literary Supplement

"[Everybody] brims with empathy . . . Laing has written a piercing book. That she has no final answer to the problem of freedom does not detract from her achievement. Indeed, she encourages us all to ask new questions to discover how it feels, and what it means, to be free — queries that are as vital as they are resistant to any single answer" - Washington Post

"Andrea Dworkin, Sontag, Malcolm X, Freud – they speak to us and come alive again, but we aren’t asked to decide if they are good or bad; we can listen to their thoughts and ideas. It’s a revelation in an age when we seem endlessly to judge and condemn our artists and thinkers" - Guardian

"A quintessential book for the precarious moment we’ve found ourselves in" - Washington Post

"Even as she glides between subjects and themes, Laing remains anchored by the bond between the body and personhood. In a standout chapter, she claims that the harm of violence is not the work it does to transform subjects into objects, but the incompletion of that work: the soul becomes a “ruin with a human face”" - New Yorker

"A new book by Olivia Laing is always cause for celebration and Everybody: A Book About Freedom is no exception" - Frieze

"Laing is radically empathetic, a writer-activist" - Vulture

"Impassioned and provocative . . . This lucid foray into some of life’s deepest questions astonishes" - Publishers Weekly, starred review

"Reflecting on her fraught sense of embodiment, Laing creates a penetrating examination of the political and cultural meanings ascribed to bodies as well as the relationships of bodies to power and freedom . . . Intellectually vigorous and emotionally stirring" - Kirkus, Starred Review

"Framed as an extended conversation between the author and her sources, in which De Sade blurs into Reich, who blurs into Sontag, and back again . . . the key to all this movement is that it also invites us to participate in the conversation — a conversation that changes as Everybody progresses, reflecting the fluidity Laing investigates." - LA Times