The Light Room

Paperback / ISBN-13: 9781472158932

Price: £10.99

ON SALE: 3rd July 2025

Genre: Biography & True Stories / Memoirs

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Hardcover

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Reviews

Elegant. . . . This is a book about the aloneness of motherhood - the limits of maternal attention, the dissolution of self, the mind-numbing tedium of raising small children - [and] a book about a "life inside" - not just inside the home, but inside the mind. . . . It may be among the most lasting literature of Covid, a lightbox for the future: the story of a mother looking for brightness in a diary of dark days
New York Times Book Review
One of our most formally ambitious writers
Esquire
One of the great uncategorizable writers of our time
Hero Magazine
Kate Zambreno has performed a miracle, capturing real, lived time from within the exhaustion of pandemic-era parenthood. The Light Room reminded me of that fundamental magic of writing-that the details of another person's life, so precisely and honestly rendered, can instantly loosen the edges of your own life and make you feel less alone
—Jenny Odell, New York Times bestselling author of How to Do Nothing
Early reviews called this book a miracle between two covers. In The Light Room, Zambreno writes about the intersections of catastrophes that unfold on a global scale . . . Zambreno writes with a sense of hope that will especially resonate with anyone who's soldiered through pandemic-era parenting
Harper's Bazaar
When Kate Zambreno writes she must use a special microscope, with which she studies the dust in the sunlight, and the clutter of motherhood, and the thinnest fibers of exhaustion and hope. The Light Room is a miracle, a wooden box with a golden clasp filled with the specimens of all our most precious, disappearing days
—Sabrina Orah Mark, author of Happily and Wild Milk
The Light Room is both a gift and a beacon
—Sinéad Gleeson, author of Constellations
Kate Zambreno has invented a new form. It is a kind of absolute present, real life captured in closeup
—Annie Ernaux, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature