They are the author of five works of non-fiction, To the River, The Trip to Echo Spring, The Lonely City, Everybody, The Garden Against Time, as well as an essay collection, Funny Weather, and a novel, Crudo.
Laing is the author of four books of nonfiction, each mixing cultural criticism and memoir with elements of biography, psychoanalysis, and travel writing.
[9] The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking (2013),[10] a finalist for both the Costa Biography Award[11] and the Gordon Burn Prize,[12] employs a similar tack.
[13] Their third book, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone, was aided by research Laing undertook as a recipient of the 2014 Eccles British Library Writer Award[14] and was published in 2016.
The result is a merging of inner and outer realities, a revelatory exploration of the intense feelings of shame that loneliness can provoke as well as a vivid portrait of 1970s and 1980s New York at the peak of the AIDS crisis.
"[23] In New Statesman, Sarah Ditum wrote that Laing "uses her style like a magician uses sleight-of-hand, palming away a hinted-at revelation while your attention has been directed towards the dazzling arc of her sentences".
[28] It explores the liberation movements of the twentieth century, examining the work and lives of a variety of figures, including Nina Simone, Susan Sontag, Andrea Dworkin and Malcolm X.
According to the Financial Times, "Laing's gift for weaving big ideas together with lyrical prose sets her alongside the likes of Arundhati Roy, John Berger and James Baldwin.