Gallic Books will publish three novels by Pascal Garnier in 2012: The Panda Theory, How’s the Pain? andThe A26. In an article for his French publisher, Zulma, Garnier described what led him to become a writer:

According to my birth certificate, I was born on 4^th July 1949 in the 14^th arrondissement of Paris. I can’t say I remember the event, but let’s assume that’s how it happened. Afterwards came a normal childhood in what you’d call the average French family – which felt more and more average the more it dawned on me that I’d been sold a world with no user’s manual, lured in by false advertising. When I was about fifteen, the state education system and I agreed to go our separate ways. I’d had enough, I was suffocating, convinced that real life was going on somewhere else. So off I went in search of it. In those days you could still travel freely through North Africa, the Middle and Far East. With my head in the clouds, I roamed about for a decade or so until I came to see that it really is a very small world and, being round, you always end up back where you started.

That’s when the wife and baby came along. All around me, the faithful companions I’d met along the way were nestling back into their kennels, burying their dreams and delusions like bones to gnaw at in years to come when they were old and toothless. Rebelling against such mass surrender, I threw myself into rock and roll – and landed with a resounding thud. I was no better at being a pop star than I was at being a dad. Still, it was writing my pitiful ditties that gave me a taste for words. Deep down, I harboured a wild dream of writing something longer, something like a book. But my limited vocabulary, terrible spelling and hopeless grammar seemed like insurmountable obstacles. So I got divorced, remarried, dabbled in design for women’s magazines, took on odd jobs, got up to the occasional bit of mischief. In short, I was killing time, frittering my life away. The boredom of my childhood numbed me once again with the sweetness of a drug. I was thirty-five.

You can only escape if you’re imprisoned, which to some extent I was. I had no choice: my only way out was through a blank page. Slowly scraping along, I dug myself out through a corner of the kitchen table, and as I tunnelled my way up to the surface, I filled the hole within myself. One short story, then two, then three… And then one day I had a publisher on the phone, and not just any publisher, but POL. A collection of twelve short stories was published under the title ‘L’année sabbatique’, ‘A year’s sabbatical’. After that, another sixty-odd books were brought out by several other publishers: books for children, books for adults, books labelled as noir or white, whatever – I’ve never been interested in that particular apartheid. So there it is, a bit muddled I’ll admit. I write because, as Pessoa said: ‘Literature is proof that life is not enough’.

Pascal Garnier

Something of the Night

Simon & Schuster Ltd 2012, Hardcover, 304 pages, £14.99

And who knows; the night might bring romance, or love, or sex, if you play your cards right. Or you might be working; millions of people work at night. If nobody worked at night, Britain would cease to function. Or the night might be cold, haunted, inhuman and wild. When you look up into the night sky, you see that you are nothing. An insignificant mote of dust.

Or the night could be all too human. Hen parties in skimpy dresses and fairy wings being slammed into the back of a police van; girls working on street corners in the part of town where the lights don’t come on; businessmen going to lap-dancing clubs to forget what waits at home.

Or you could die. Most people do die at night. Or you could just lie awake and wait for the dawn. Set over the course of an intoxicated night in a house up a mountain in West Cork, Ian Marchant offers a darkly funny account of what people get up to at night, explores his own experience of a life of night times, and shows us how we all have something of the night about us.

• Read the extract

Tideline

Simon & Schuster Ltd 2012, Hardcover, 352 pages, £12.99

One winter’s afternoon, voice coach Sonia opens the door of her beautiful riverside home to fifteen-year-old Jez, the nephew of a family friend. He’s come to borrow some music. Sonia invites him in and soon decides that she isn’t going to let him leave.

As Sonia’s desire to keep Jez hidden and protected from the outside world becomes all the more overpowering, she is haunted by memories of an intense teenage relationship, which gradually reveal a terrifying truth. The River House, Sonia’s home since childhood, holds secrets within its walls. And outside, on the shores of the Thames, new ones are coming in on the tide…

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Or so goes the conventional wisdom in publishing. It wasn’t always like this. Twenty-five years ago, big literary biographies were, along with potential Booker-prize winning novels, the goal of every serious editor. The bigger they were the better, and they often came in many volumes. Norman Sherry on Graham Greene, Michael Holroyd on George Bernard Shaw: full of details, a relentless tracking down of every relationship, every minor work, and every house the writer ever lived in. They combined the Victorian tradition of massive Lives and Letters with psychoanalytic awareness and frankness about the personal flaws of their subjects, so that no stone was left unturned, no laundry left unexamined. There were surely readers ploughing through Holroyd on Shaw who had never read more than a fraction of what Shaw himself wrote.

These books cost publishers a fortune. It may have been this, the impossible economics of paying writers enough to undertake such heroic feats of research and the struggle to keep the books in print, that discouraged publishers from sponsoring such ambitious projects in the 21st century. But the public also seemed to have had enough of them, and of course once Trollope or Proust has been ‘done’ competently for a generation of readers it takes some striking new information or a radically revisionist approach to make those readers invest in another book on the same subject. There is also a certain limit to the number of writers that reward the effort a biography demands. Is there anything more that can intelligently be said about the Bloomsbury circle, whose most minor affiliates have been crawled over by diligent literary dung-beetles?

Whatever the reason, whenever an editor proposed a new biography in the second decade of the new century, the look on sales peoples’ faces would sour milk. They had their reasons. No matter how eminent, biographers struggled to sell their books. The quantities revealed in the cruel glare of the Bookscan system, linked to about 85% of British bookshops, were truly pitiful. But this is hardly proof that readers have become uninterested in the lives of others. They have become bored by elephantine completism and by retreads; many people will have asked themselves just how many biographies of, Darwin, for example, they needed to have on their shelves. Yet when a neglected figure is written about whose accomplishments deserve to be understood and celebrated and placed in context, the public returns. Learning about the turmoil, the rags and bones from which great work springs will always be deeply fascinating.

Three years ago I had the privilege of editing Graham Farmelo’s The Strangest Man, a superb life of Paul Dirac, the greatest British physicist of the 20th century. If he’d been a writer he’d already have been done to death, but Dirac might as well not have existed for most non-scientists and was virgin soil for a biographer. Farmelo’s book – fully attentive to the human dimension of this eccentric genius – found a wide audience and went on to win the 2009 Costa Award for biography, the UK’s most prestigious prize for life writing.

Now Matthew Hollis has won the 2011 Costa for his remarkable Now All Roads Lead to France, a book about the last years of Edward Thomas that were also the years in which he realised his gift as a lyric poet and created a body of poems that have been enormously influential on British and Irish poets ever since. It is also the story of Thomas’s friendship with Robert Frost, who encouraged him to break out of prose. The book is not a conventional biography, though the reader learns enough about Thomas’s earlier life, and its concentration on the last few creative and tragic years delivers a powerful emotional charge. Hollis’s book has attracted unusual, unforced praise, and featured in a large number of critics’ lists of their books of the year. For the Costa prize it was shortlisted with Claire Tomalin’s brilliant new life of Dickens (which has sold more than 50,000 copies in hardback, another indication that biography’s terminal illness has periods of serious remission), Patrick Cockburn‘s brave and moving story of his son Henry’s mental crisis, which was written with Henry (and which I wish I had been able to publish), and Julia Blackburn’s account of her life in Tuscany. It is a real achievement to win a major award against such distinguished competition.

Ironic for me, really, because when I came into this trade, or craft (or whatever the hell it is), I defined myself against the vast slabs of biography then being published. I never wanted to publish books about individual lives unless they illuminated something larger too, though I remember feeling a little inferior about not having a serious literary biography on my totem pole. So I asked Gerald Martin to write a life of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. It took him nearly twenty years. (At the time I couldn’t see two years ahead, never mind twenty). By the time Gerry had finished the manuscript was about 2,500 pages long and would have made a great multi-volume Life of the kind that was being published when I first commissioned it, but more interesting, because from it you could learn so much about the history of Colombia and the golden age of the Latin American novel. We couldn’t agree about any practical way of publishing the book and parted amicably, at least I hope we did. A different editor, Bill Swainson, managed to carve out the smaller but very fine book that was by then the only feasible version, and I had the strange experience of seeing the first biography I ever commissioned coming out under a rival imprint (Bloomsbury). I hope one day – perhaps through the infinite possibilities of digital publishing – to see the full version made available. It would give me a very late and tenuous connection to the ranks of Big Lives.

For the moment, though, I feel happy publishing Matthew Hollis’s book, one of the most sheerly beautiful pieces of work I’ve ever been lucky enough to edit.

Biography is dead? Nah, it’s just resting.

Neil Belton

++++

Now All Roads Lead to France

Faber and Faber 2012, Paperback, 416 pages, £9.99

Edward Thomas was perhaps the most beguiling and influential of First World War poets. Now All Roads Lead to France is an account of his final five years, centred on his extraordinary friendship with Robert Frost and Thomas’s fatal decision to fight in the war. The book also evokes an astonishingly creative moment in English literature, when London was a battleground for new, ambitious kinds of writing. A generation that included W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, Robert Frost and Rupert Brooke were ‘making it new’ – vehemently and pugnaciously. These larger-than-life characters surround a central figure, tormented by his work and his marriage. But as his friendship with Frost blossomed, Thomas wrote poem after poem, and his emotional affliction began to lift. In 1914 the two friends formed the ideas that would produce some of the most remarkable verse of the twentieth century. But the War put an ocean between them: Frost returned to the safety of New England while Thomas stayed to fight for the Old. It is these roads taken – and those not taken – that are at the heart of this remarkable book, which culminates in Thomas’s tragic death on Easter Monday 1917.

John Lanchester

The books I loved best this year were, in fiction, Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding and Tom Rachman’s The Imperfectionists. In non-fiction, I loved Nicola Shulman’s Graven with Diamonds and Owen Hatherley’s A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain. Reference: Jonathan Green’s three-volume Dictionary of Slang is the greatest piece of work of its kind that anyone has ever done.

I’m struggling to think of a great new film this year, or a great new piece of music – that probably just reflects a narrowness of activity on my part. (I was going to mention Rufus Wainwright’s All Days are Nights, but I see it came out in 2010). My favourite TV programme was The Killing, closely followed by A Game of Thrones, and I also became profoundly addicted to the George R. R. Martin novels on which that series was based. In theatre, I loved Graham Linehan’s hilarious adaptation of The Ladykillers.

• John Lanchester’s new novel Capital is published in March.

Sarah Hall

It’s not often that novelists manage to vault over into the film world but two of Faber’s finest writers – Julia Leigh and Owen Sheers – have done just that. Leigh’s directorial debut, Sleeping Beauty, is an unsettling erotic drama about a young student who allows herself to be drugged for sexual purposes in order to make money, and it’s top of my list of films to see before the year is out. I’m a huge fan of her novels – The Hunter and Disquiet – which are both masterpieces of human psychology and inner darkness. The controversy surrounding the film seems to be an intriguing platform from which to discuss modern feminism, sexual fantasy and power-struggles.

Owen Sheers co-wrote the adaptation of his novel Resistance for the screen and oversaw much of the making of the film. The result is an astonishingly beautiful, tense, counter-factual story about a Nazi invasion of Britain during the Second World War. Featuring the epic landscape of the Welsh borders and some of the best acting performances I’ve seen of late, and raising thought-provoking questions about loyalty, collaboration and identity, this is truly a triumph of British cinema.

• Sarah Hall’s collection of stories – The Beautiful Indifference – is available now in paperback.

Alan Glynn

I’ve been a committed ECM head for years now, can’t get enough of that chilly, mostly Nordic studio-bound perfection, so it was a rare treat in Dublin’s National Concert Hall one Sunday last June to see live performances by Trygve Seim’s The Source, by Stefano Bollani and by Nik Bartsch’s Ronin – an incredible variety of sounds, styles and rhythms to absorb in a single evening. I was especially impressed by Ronin’s gorgeous, slow-build minimalism, a hypnotic style that has sometimes been called (perhaps inadvisedly) zen funk. What we’re talking here is the love child of James Brown and Steve Reich.

And in 2012? No question. It has to be the publication in May by Knopf of Robert A. Caro’s long-awaited The Passage to Power, the fourth volume in his epic and mesmerising biography of Lyndon B. Johnson – not just a biography, but a Shakespearean study in power, not just the story of one man, but a rich and complex portrait of the American century. There were supposed to be only three volumes, then four, and now it appears there will have to be a fifth. This one covers 1958-1964. Senator, veep, prez. Who could ask for anything more? Caro’s narrative powers are astonishing.

• Alan Glynn’s Bloodland won the Ireland AM Irish Crime Fiction Book of the Year Award 2011.

Nicholas Rankin

True Grit by Charles Portis has the perfect narrator for its journey into hell: a sassy, cantankerous, puritan Arkansas girl fallen among frontier ne’er-do-wells. The Coen brothers’ film of the book channelled that voice faithfully, enhancing the religiosity of this American masterpiece through choice music and imagery. I was also spellbound by the daredevil gypsy Johnny ‘Rooster’ Byron, charismatically portrayed by Mark Rylance in Jez Butterworth’s play Jerusalem. West End audiences roared with laughter, but the true power of the piece comes from its deep taproot into older greenwood myths, summoning up the wild spirit of the true Brit.

The blank pages of the new diary give little idea of what’s coming. But every year something raw and surprising erupts through the calendar. I know that I’ll be in the Basque country for the 75th anniversary of the bombing of Guernica in April, and in St Andrews, Scotland in late August for the first international academic conference on the books of that controversial, apocalyptic and very funny writer, Maggie Gee, whose work people seem either to love or loathe. It’s going to be weird hearing Scots, Turks, Yanks and Catalans talking about my beloved wife.

• Nicholas Rankin’s new book – Ian Fleming’s Commandos – is out now in hardback.

Andrew Martin

I very much enjoyed Tomas Alfredson’s film of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy: the dour Seventies made beautiful. All the spies looked like my dad’s colleagues on British Rail in that decade. I saw it three times. That said, it wasn’t as good as his previous film, Let The Right One In, and yet I somehow only got around to seeing that twice.

Next year, I am looking forward to the publication in May of Martin Amis’s new novel, State of England. I read The Pregnant Widow, and found it a sprawling, reckless, if, of course, brilliant book. For all its bravado, it was as though Amis had been intimidated by years of abuse from critics, and so had written a deliberately mad novel that would be beyond conventional analysis. I am hoping that State of England will be more contained, and more straightforwardly comedic, because Amis is by far the funniest writer in Britain.

• The most recent outing for Andrew Martin’s Jim Stringer – The Somme Stations – was published in 2011. The next instalment – The Baghdad Railway Club – should arrive on time in June 2012.

Graham Farmelo

I’ve come to the conclusion that, for me at least, the process of writing is inimical to the writer’s appreciation of culture. It’s been a thin year for me, but one experience has stood out – an afternoon at a building I expected to be kitsch monstrosity, but found a masterpiece: the Taj Mahal.

I cannot wait for the greatest English-speaking actor on the stage to return to Shakespeare: it’s thrilling to hear that Mark Rylance will be back at The Globe, giving us his Richard III and, in Twelfth Night, a reprise of his miraculous Olivia.

• Graham Farmelo’s award-winning biography of Paul Dirac – The Strangest Man – is available in paperback.

Fiona MacCarthy

My cultural highlight of 2011 was the opening of the Hepworth, an ambitious purpose-built new gallery in Wakefield where the sculptor Barbara Hepworth was born in 1903. The building is designed by David Chipperfield, an architect of great intelligence and sensitivity who (as far as I’m concerned) never puts a foot wrong. Externally the Hepworth is restrained grey granite, dignified, expectant and beautifully detailed; inside the spaces open out spectacularly, displaying not just Hepworth but her marvellous contemporaries Ben Nicholson, Henry Moore, Naum Gabo, setting her in context and reminding us what a magnificent artist and indeed an extraordinary woman of exemplary determination Hepworth truly was.

That I’m a huge enthusiast of Gustav Klimt will hardly surprise anyone who has read my recent biography of Edward Burne-Jones. Klimt was in many ways a close disciple, a brilliant decorative designer as well as a fine draughtsman and next summer Vienna will be awash with exhibitions celebrating his 150th anniversary. I shall certainly be in Austria in May for a Jugendstil bonanza: hundreds of Klimt drawings at the Albertina, objects, posters, graphics at the Wien Museum as well as Klimt’s famous painting smock and death mask. Just as fascinating will be the exhibition of textile designs by Emilie Flöge, Klimt’s lover, whose fashion salon was the talk of turn-of-the-century Vienna. I can hardly wait.

• Fiona MacCarthy’s biography of Edward Burne-Jones – The Last Pre-Raphaelite – is out now in hardback.

Doug Johnstone

My cultural highlight of 2011 has been the television adaptation of Christos Tsiolkas’s novel The Slap. I thought Tsiolkas’s book was a triumph, a brilliant but brutal insight into the problems inherent in modern Australian life, and the adaptation by ABC has really done it justice. Fantastically acted, directed, scripted and filmed, it’s a morally complex, emotionally honest piece of work that really packs a punch. The story concerns a man slapping someone else’s kid at a barbecue, and the eight hour-long episodes each go into the aftermath from a different character’s point of view. Drama that just oozes quality.

The thing I’m most looking forward to in 2012 is another adaptation – this time the movie version of The Motel Life. The novel is written by Willy Vlautin who’s just the finest writer of modern American smalltown noir around, and the story concerns two brothers who go on the run following a disastrous car accident. The movie has Dakota Fanning, Stephen Dorff, Emile Hirsch and Kris Kristofferson starring in it, so it looks to have a decent pedigree. The worry is that they won’t get the tone of the novel right, of course, but fingers crossed.

• A new novel from Doug Johnstone – Hit and Run – is published in March.

Richard T. Kelly

George Steiner argues that the best criticism of music is musical (‘Asked to explain a difficult etude, Schumann sat down and played it a second time.’) The recent tendency of senior rock musicians to revisit their bestselling compositions is very evidently linked to money; and Peter Gabriel, too, must make a living. But this year’s New Blood CD and tour – the re-exploration by orchestra of some of his finest songs – re-confirmed Gabriel as a radical, experimental musical force in the Reed/Bowie/Byrne mould: its rhythms and melodies newly dynamic, Gabriel’s mature voice the vital element in the magisterial mood, feeling and drama of the arrangements.

One of my happiest literary discoveries in 2011 was the Argentine novelist Carlos Gamerro, whose work began to appear in English this year with An Open Secret from Pushkin Press. Forthcoming in 2012 from And Other Stories is The Islands, which the publisher describes as ‘a detective novel, a cyber-thriller, an inner-city road trip and a war memoir’ – that war being the Falklands/Malvinas conflict that commenced 30 years ago next April. I look forward to Gamerro’s fictional refracting of that history with a great deal of eagerness.

• Richard T. Kelly’s novels – Crusaders and The Possessions of Doctor Forrest – are both available in paperback.

John Cooper

A highlight of 2011 was attending the private view of the ‘Northern Arcadia’ exhibition of paintings and collages by Ed Kluz in Hornseys’ Gallery in Ripon. Ed’s fascination with roofless mansions and architectural follies pays tribute to John Piper, and there are other echoes of Bawden and Ravilious, but he has a way of capturing the English landscape which is wholly his own.  Ed has recently completed a commission for Faber, and is soon to finish a study of Jervaulx Abbey in North Yorkshire for my wife (Suzanne Fagence Cooper, biographer of Effie Millais) and me.

As for 2012, I am most looking forward to returning to Godolphin in west Cornwall. The Godolphins were tin-mining gentry, who used their growing wealth to add a remarkable colonnaded portico to their medieval house. The garden dates back to Tudor times. Part of the property was demolished in the early nineteenth century, but what remains is a gem. I knew it when it was still privately owned, and had the privilege of climbing scaffolding to look deep into the heart of the house when it was being restored in the 1990s. It has now been taken over by the National Trust; we’re staying there to celebrate a friend’s birthday.

• John Cooper’s The Queen’s Agent: Francis Walsingham at the Court of Elizabeth I is out now in hardback.

Helen Castor

This year I loved theatre company 1927‘s The Animals and Children took to the Streets – a beautiful, grotesque, dark and hilarious compound of words, music, animation, mime and gumdrops, all mixed together into an extraordinary evening with real bite.

In 2012, I know I won’t be alone in counting the days until Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies is published. I’ve been reading about the 1530s for almost as long as I can remember – but I still can’t wait to find out what happens…

• Helen Castor is the author of Blood & Roses and She-Wolves.

Rob Young

My cultural highlights of 2011 were topped by Roy Harper‘s extraordinary 70th birthday concert at the Royal Festival Hall in November. Probably the most emotional live show I’ve witnessed, not least for Roy himself who seemed close to tears on several occasions. A man who can command both Joanna Newsom and Jimmy Page to join him on stage is not to be trifled with! I could also mention the very welcome DVD reissue of David Gladwell’s Requiem For A Village (BFI) and brilliant novels by Tom McCarthy (C) and Teju Cole (Open City).

Two eagerly awaited things for the beginning of 2012: Geoff Dyer’s obsessive close reading of Tarkovsky’s Stalker, Zona (Pantheon); and the second edition of The Wire magazine’s Off The Page festival in Whitstable (24–26 February). Call it what you want: a music festival with no music, or a literary festival focused on music, sound and beyond, last year’s weekend was an incredibly stimulating and friendly environment with an articulate mix of musicians, sound artists, critics and authors.

• Rob Young is the author of Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain’s Visionary Music, available now in paperback.

Clare Wigfall

A book I’ve loved this year is Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad. Egan herself termed it ‘entangled stories’, her publishers of course called it a novel, in truth it’s neither and both, an exciting new hybrid literary form. Whatever, I loved it. My favourite story collection was Sarah Hall’s The Beautiful Indifference – dark, raw, and heartbreaking stories.

I saw a mesmerising exhibition of August Sander portraits at the Dean Gallery in Edinburgh.

The best theatre piece I went to was 1927’s performance of The Animals and Children Took to the Streets at the Edinburgh Fringe. The show was roach-infested yet beguiling, bitingly witty, and so intricately and inventively staged it took my breath away.

An album I’ve played a lot is Danish singer Agnes Obel’s Philarmonics. The video for her song Riverside reminds me of the old photographs I used to find in my Czech attic:

Most addictive TV was definitely The Killing.

• Clare Wigfall is the author of The Loudest Sound and Nothing.

When God Was a Rabbit

Headline Review 2011, Paperback, 352 pages, £7.99

Young Elly Portman’s world is shaped by those who inhabit it: her loving but maddeningly distractible parents; a best friend who smells of chips and knows exotic words like ‘slag’; an ageing fop who tapdances his way into her home, a Shirley Bassey impersonator who trails close behind; lastly, of course, a rabbit called God. In a childhood peppered with moments both ordinary and extraordinary, Elly’s one constant is her brother Joe.

Twenty years on, Elly and Joe are fully grown and as close as they ever were. Until, that is, one bright morning when a single, earth-shattering event threatens to destroy their bond forever.

• Read the extract

Charles Dickens

Viking 2011, Hardcover, 576 pages, £30.00

Charles Dickens: A Life, by Claire Tomalin (Winner)

Charles Dickens was a phenomenon: a demonicly hardworking journalist, the father of ten children, a tireless walker and traveller, a supporter of liberal social causes, but most of all a great novelist – the creator of characters who live immortally in the English imagination: the Artful Dodger, Mr Pickwick, Pip, David Copperfield, Little Nell, Lady Dedlock, and many more.

At the age of twelve he was sent to work in a blacking factory by his affectionate but feckless parents. From these unpromising beginnings, he rose to scale all the social and literary heights, entirely through his own efforts. When he died, the world mourned, and he was buried – against his wishes – in Westminster Abbey.

Yet the brilliance concealed a divided character: a republican, he disliked America; sentimental about the family in his writings, he took up passionately with a young actress; usually generous, he cut off his impecunious children.

Claire Tomalin, author of Whitbread Book of the Year Samuel Pepys, paints an unforgettable portrait of Dickens, capturing brilliantly the complex character of this great genius. Charles Dickens: A Life is the examination of Dickens we deserve.

•  Read the extract

Before I Go To Sleep

Doubleday 2011, Hardcover, 368 pages, £12.99

‘As I sleep, my mind will erase everything I did today. I will wake up tomorrow as I did this morning. Thinking I’m still a child. Thinking I have a whole lifetime of choice ahead of me …’

Welcome to Christine’s life.

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• Win an audiobook of Before I Go To Sleep on Bookdagger!

Room

Picador 2011, Paperback, 336 pages, £7.99

Jack is five. He lives with Ma in a single locked room and, as far as he’s concerned, that’s the entire world. But then Ma explains there’s a world outside – and when she and Jack manage to escape, Jack has to learn to live outside of Room…

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