Available as Hardback, eBook, Downloadable audio
8 May 2025
An urgent and profound excavation of the self, Holly Dawson’s All of Us Atoms is a stunning memoir of the moments of becoming that form a life, heralding the arrival of a major new literary voice
You tell me we are made of seven billion billion billion atoms. I can feel every one of them as I write this all down. It’s a rush to feel that, like falling in love. Remembering is like falling in love with you, with us, again and again.
What makes us who we are? What stories do we inherit – and leave behind?
Faced with the prospect of losing her memory, a writer revisits the moments that changed her – from childhood to motherhood, loss and ill-health. Through shifting pronouns and perspectives, moving across place and time, each piece twists the kaleidoscope of existence to make sense of the present through the past. From the opening battle between her brain and her body, a conversation emerges between her collection of selves: the Daughter, the Sister, the Dancer, the Gardener, the Mother, the Girl-Who-Read-Woolf. Reliving her journey of becoming, she unpicks the fabric of fact and experience to stitch a new tapestry of personhood, both real and imaginary, mundane and profound.
All of Us Atoms offers a tender portrait of the tension between our drive to make sense of things and the freedom that comes from throwing categories away. It heralds the arrival of a major new literary voice, urging us to reframe and reclaim our own stories and revel in our mutable, messy, multitudinous selves.
“I loved it. The smarts, lyricisms, surprises and deep humanity of it all”
Susie Orbach
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“Brilliant, brave, wild and marvellous. Holly Dawson’s book embodies a woman’s capacity for laughter, tenderness, resilience and maternal love in a way that only the very best writing can do. Even when everything feels like it might be lost, she never extinguishes that glimmer of hope that that will save us all”
Juliet Nicolson
“When you read All of Us Atoms, your perception of time will expand, your eyes will brighten and your heart will race with a sense of recognition. This is the portrait of a brilliant brain unravelling and reassembling like an ingenious accordion from another era. Space, sound and perception scatter around the pages like luminous molecules and you’ll have fortunate glimpses of a primordial sense of being in the world. I loved being in the atoms of Holly Dawson’s world. I never wanted to leave”
Chiara Barzini
”All of Us Atoms is an extraordinary memoir. A love letter to a life and all the lives within it. Tender, epic, brutal and entirely unexpected. I loved it.”
Denise Gough
Holly Dawson
Holly Dawson is a writer, editor and teacher. Since 2018, she has been Reader-in-Residence at Charleston, where she gets to indulge her passion for Modernist literature and Virginia Woolf. Her plays, drawing on Bloomsbury diaries and letters, have been performed by actors including Helena Bonham Carter, Miranda Richardson and Jonathan Pryce. Having grown up in Cornwall, she now lives in rural Sussex with far too many hens.
@hollyjdawson | hollyjdawson.com