The Road Home

"Timeless and bitingly contemporary, this novel explores the life now lived by millions—when one's hope lies in one country and one's heart in another." —The New Yorker

In the wake of factory closings and his beloved wife's death, Lev is on his way from Eastern Europe to London, seeking work to support his mother and his little daughter. He finds a job in the kitchen of a posh restaurant, and a room in the house of an appealing Irishman who has also lost his family. However constricted his life in England remains he compensates by daydreaming of home, by having an affair with a younger restaurant worker, and by trading gossip and ambitions via cell phone with his hilarious old friend Rudi.


Homesickness dogs Lev, not only for nostalgic reasons, but because he doesn't belong, body or soul, to his new country—but can he really go home again?


Rose Tremain's prodigious talents as a prose writer are on full display in The Road Home, but her novel never loses sight of what is truly important in the lives we lead.


"Like Amy Bloom's recent novel, Away, or Ha Jin's A Free Life . . . Tremain has written a worthy addition to the growing body of work centered on the loneliness and frustration of the immigrant experience." ―Library Journal

"A moving, utterly absorbing portrait." —San Francisco Chronicle

"The pleasure, the wit and the joy in humanity that Tremain brings to every page do what literature, at its best, should do: connect us, as E.M. Forester famously exhorted." —Los Angeles Times

"Tremain elevates the subject beyond its outlines by making Lev . . . a man-fully embodied" —New York Times Book Review