Home Fires
A Novel
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
A stunning portrait of a family bookended by war, Home Fires explores the legacy of loss, the strictures of class, and the long road to redemption.
Max Weston, twenty-one and a newly commissioned lance corporal, leaves home for his first posting in central Africa. Fiercely patriotic and a natural leader, he is eager to make a difference.
He never comes back.
His parents, Caroline and Andrew, are devastated by the death of their only child. Their grief threatens to overwhelm their marriage until the empty space between them is filled by the arrival of Andrew's ninety-eight-year-old mother, Elsa. Always elegant, cutting and critical of Caroline, the old woman is now disabled and disoriented. As she lies in the spare room, the past unspools in Elsa's mind, loosening fragments of her anxious childhood with her mercurial father, who returned from the Great War a changed man.
Under one roof, the Westons come to understand each other in new ways, and the domestic stories of multiple generations coalesce into a potent exploration of the legacies of war and love.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In modern-day England, Elsa Weston is 98, debilitated by a stroke, and furious at not being able to express herself or make her body follow orders. In 1920, she is a child trying to cope with a father she barely recalls, back from the war that has left him depressed, angry, and abusive. In between she is the elegant, contained, upper-class woman who intimidates her daughter-in-law, Caroline. In her U.S. debut, Day is excellent at showing the complexities of human relationships, making us sympathize with Elsa when we're with her, while pulling no punches about how inflexible and imperious she is when seen from Caroline's vantage point. The problem is that this subtlety is serving a larger story that isn't particularly interesting: Caroline and Andrew's son, Max, by all accounts exactly the kind of man one would want in the army, enlists and is killed during his first posting in Africa. Devastated by grief, Caroline turns away from her husband and develops a Xanax habit, and when Elsa's decline necessitates a move to Caroline and Andrew's house, everyone's isolation and anger is compounded. Day is given to telling us things we could figure out for ourselves, but the real problem is the lack of events or emotional variety in this well-intentioned but flat story.
