Welcome Home, Stranger Welcome Home, Stranger

Welcome Home, Stranger

A Novel

    • 3.6 • 50 Ratings
    • $12.99
    • $12.99

Publisher Description

“Kate Christensen’s 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?”—Richard Russo, author of Somebody’s Fool

“To the great literature of going home again we can now add Kate Christensen’s 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.”—Ann Packer, author of The Children’s Crusade

“A deeply endearing story about confronting one’s past and constructing a new future—under extreme duress. . . . Welcome Home, Stranger . . . arrives at the most lovely ending of a novel I’ve read all year."—Washington 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 home—reluctantly—to 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, she’s 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 fall–until she’s summoned home to deal with the aftermath of her mother’s death.

Then things really fall apart.

Surrounded by a cast of sometimes comic, sometimes heartbreakingly serious characters—an arriviste sister, an alcoholic brother-in-law and, most importantly, the love of her life recently married to the sister’s best friend–Rachel 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.

GENRE
Fiction & Literature
RELEASED
2023
December 5
LANGUAGE
EN
English
LENGTH
224
Pages
PUBLISHER
Harper
SELLER
HARPERCOLLINS PUBLISHERS
SIZE
1.5
MB

Customer Reviews

Laskalass ,

Welcome Home Stranger

The book begins in a somewhat meandering direction. The story line is not clear at first and the character of Rachel seems lost in a quagmire of descriptive adjectives. I thought the book to be very dark and pointless until the middle when i began to care about the character who is all too real and too familiar to me. The story of a middle aged survivor of abuse finding her purpose. She seems almost cursed with bad luck and I wanted there to be some point where I felt there had to be some redeeming enlightened reasons for some of her karma. I feel like the ending could have been resolved more fully. The writing is crisp and well wrought.

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More Books by Kate Christensen

Blue Plate Special Blue Plate Special
2013
The Last Cruise The Last Cruise
2018
The Great Man The Great Man
2007
The Astral The Astral
2011
The Epicure's Lament The Epicure's Lament
2004
In the Drink In the Drink
1999

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