Connecting art and loneliness through a sharp-focused lens

Non-fiction; The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone; By Olivia Laing; Canongate Books, €23

Nighthawks by Edward Hopper: ‘Was the diner a place of succour, or did it serve to illustrate the disconnection that proliferated in cities?’

Early on in The Lonely City, Olivia Laing defines loneliness as “a felt absence or insufficiency of closeness”. By this point, she has already admitted her own loneliness, while at the same time introducing the idea that loneliness is a common state, an individual condition mutually shared by many people. “Loneliness, I began to realise, was a populated place: a city in itself,” she writes.

In addition to The Lonely City, Laing is ...