The Reason I Jump: The Inner Voice of a Thirteen-Year-Old Boy with Autism Paperback - 2013

Media reviews

#1 INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER
 
“[The Reason I Jump] brings the fascinating quirks of the autistic mind to life.... Naoki brings us into a sometimes nightmarish world of being trapped inside a mind and body that won’t respond as it should.... The definitive account of living with autism.”
—Daily Express
 
“The Reason I Jump...offers sometimes tormented, sometimes joyous, insights into autism’s locked-in universe.... Higashida’s child’s-eye view of autism is as much a winsome work of the imagination as it is a user’s manual for parents, carers and teachers. In its quirky humour and courage, it resembles Albert Espinosa’s Spanish bestseller, The Yellow World, which captured the inner world of childhood cancer. This book gives us autism from the inside, as we have never seen it.... Its explanation, advice and, most poignantly, its guilt...offers readers eloquent access into an almost entirely unknown world.... Descriptions of panic, distress and the isolation that autistic children feel as a result of the greater world’s ignorance of their condition are counterbalanced by the most astonishing glimpses of autism’s exhilaration. These are the most vivid and mesmerising moments of the book.”
—The Independent 
 
“The Reason I Jump pushes beyond the notion of autism as a disability, and reveals it as simply a different way of being, and of seeing. Naoki Higashida shines a light on the autistic landscape from the inside.”
—BBC 
 
“A 13-year-old Japanese author illuminates his autism from within, making a connection with those who find the condition frustrating, mysterious or impenetrable. For the renowned novelist David Mitchell, who provides the introduction and collaborated on the translation, this book is ‘a revelatory godsend.’... [Higashida] shows remarkable empathy and imagination.... Anyone struggling to understand autism will be grateful for the book and translation.”
—Kirkus Reviews