Rebecca Solnit: The Faraway Nearby at Kings Place

In her new book The Faraway Nearby, Rebecca Solnit tells us how, one summer, she was bequeathed a hundred pounds of ripening apricots, which lay on her bedroom floor - an emergency to be dealt with. The fruit came from a neglected tree that her mother, gradually succumbing to memory loss, could no longer tend to. From this unexpected inheritance came stories. As she looks back on the year of apricots and emergencies, Solnit draws together the threads of her life with the lives of others; explorers and artists, the Marquis de Sade and Mary Shelley, the living and the dead. Woven together these stories create a map which charts the boundaries and the territories of storytelling, empathy and giving; an impassioned defence of the spaces we share and the ways in which they form us.