Welcome Home, Stranger

Kate Christensens 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 Somebodys Fool To the great literature of going home again we can now add Kate Christensens 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 Childrens Crusade A deeply endearing story about confronting ones past and constructing a new futureunder extreme duress. . . . Welcome Home, Stranger . . . arrives at the most lovely ending of a novel Ive 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 homereluctantlyto 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, shes 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 falluntil shes summoned home to deal with the aftermath of her mothers death. Then things really fall apart. Surrounded by a cast of sometimes comic, sometimes heartbreakingly serious charactersan arriviste sister, an alcoholic brother-in-law and, most importantly, the love of her life recently married to the sisters best friendRachel 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.