The Year We Left Home
A Novel
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3.8 • 124 Ratings
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
A New York Times bestseller, The Year We Left Home is National Book Award finalist Jean Thompson’s mesmerizing, decades-spanning saga of one ordinary American family that captures the turbulent history of the country at large.
Named a New York Times Editors’ Choice, a People magazine “Pick of the Week,” and an Indie Next and Midwest Connections selection, The Year We Left Home is the career-defining novel that Jean Thompson’s admirers have been waiting for: a sweeping and emotionally powerful story of a single American family during the tumultuous final decades of the twentieth century.
Stretching from the early 1970s in the Iowa farmlands to suburban Chicago and across the map of contemporary America, The Year We Left Home follows the Erickson siblings as they confront prosperity and heartbreak, setbacks and triumphs, and seek their place in a country whose only constant seems to be breathtaking change. Ambitious and richly told, this is a vivid and moving meditation on our continual pursuit of happiness and an incisive exploration of the national character.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Bookended by two wars Vietnam and Iraq Thompson's third novel (after the collection Do Not Deny Me) sketches the travails of an Iowa family over three decades. Matriarch Audrey neatly sums up the episodic novel's grand theme: "she'd been born into one world, hopeful and normal, and now she lived in another, full of sadness and failure." The novel opens as oldest daughter Anita, the beauty of the family, celebrates her marriage. Over the years, however, Anita confronts dissatisfaction with herself and disillusionment with her pompous husband. Her younger brother, Ryan, a high school senior as the novel opens, longs to escape his rural roots, dating a hippie poet and majoring in political science before realizing that the farmers who came before him might hold more relevance than he'd imagined. Cousin Chip comes back from Vietnam troubled and aimless, his wanderings from Seattle to Reno, Nev., to Veracruz, Mexico, offering a parallel to the spiritual restlessness all the other characters feel. Told from the point of view of more than a half-dozen characters, the vignettes that make up the narrative are generally powerful in isolation, but as a whole fail to develop into anything more than a series of snapshots of a family touched by time and tragedy.
Customer Reviews
The Year We Left Home
Once in a while I read a book good enough to put in that section of bookcase with the books that will be read again. At the close of this book, I went from the last page to the first page. I won't reread the entire book again immediately, but want to re-read the set up again, the introduction to the immensely rich characters' stories and see what I might have missed in the first reading.
I've known every one of these people, most of them for my entire life. Thank you, Jean Thompson, for gathering these old friends and giving them a place to inhabit until I am ready to visit them again. And again. There are only about ten or so books that I reread: I'm not wise enough to know if Jean Thompson belongs in the company of Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, and J.R.R. Tolkien, but she will spend the rest of my life in their company in my library.