āKate Christensenās new novel, Welcome Home, Stranger, is a revelation, offering characters as real as your family and friends, a rich, vividly drawn setting, grab-you-by-the-throat drama and always, lurking in the shadows, a fierce authorial intelligence. What more could you ask?āāRichard Russo, author of Somebodyās Fool
āTo the great literature of going home again we can now add Kate Christensenās superb new novel Welcome Home, Stranger, a triumph of intelligence and wit (which will surprise none of her many fans). The prodigal here is a brilliant journalist grieving the loss of a very difficult mother while attempting peace with those she left behind: a resentful sister and an ex-lover who can be neither trusted nor forgotten. A spellbinding book from one of our best chroniclers of the very American struggle to strive for excellence while still living in community with others.āāAnn Packer, author of The Childrenās Crusade
āA deeply endearing story about confronting oneās past and constructing a new futureāunder extreme duress. . . . Welcome Home, Stranger . . . arrives at the most lovely ending of a novel Iāve read all year.""āWashington Post[
From the PEN-Faulkner Award-winning author of The Great Man comes a novel about grief, love, growing older, and the complications of family that is the story of a fifty-something woman who goes homeāreluctantlyāto Maine after the death of her mother.
Can you ever truly go home again?
An environmental journalist in Washington, DC, Rachel has shunned her New England working-class family for years. Divorced and childless in her middle age, sheās a true independent spirit with the pain and experience to prove it. Coping with challenges large and small, she thinks her life is in free fallāuntil sheās summoned home to deal with the aftermath of her motherās death.
Then things really fall apart.
Surrounded by a cast of sometimes comic, sometimes heartbreakingly serious charactersāan arriviste sister, an alcoholic brother-in-law and, most importantly, the love of her life recently married to the sisterās best friendāRachel must come to terms with her past, the sorrow she has long buried, and the ghost of the mother who, for better and worse, made her the woman she is.
Lively, witty, and painfully familiar, this sophisticated and emotionally resonant novel from the author of The Great Man holds a mirror up to modern life as it considers the way some of us must carry on now.