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A Memoir of Departure and Return
by Rebecca Mead
A moving reflection on the complicated nature of home and homeland, and the heartache and adventure of leaving an adopted country in order to return to your native land - this is a "winsome memoir of departure and reversal...about the way a series of unknowns accrue into a life" (Jia Tolentino, author of Trick Mirror).
When the New Yorker writer Rebecca Mead relocated to her birth city, London, with her family in the summer of 2018, she was both fleeing the political situation in America and seeking to expose her son to a wider world. With a keen sense of what she'd given up as she left New York, her home of thirty years, she tried to knit herself into the fabric of a changed London. The move raised poignant questions about place: What does it mean to leave the place you have adopted as home and country? And what is the value and cost of uprooting yourself?
In a deft mix of memoir and reportage, drawing on literature and art, recent and ancient history, and the experience of encounters with individuals, environments, and landscapes in New York City and in England, Mead artfully explores themes of identity, nationality, and inheritance. She recounts her time in the coastal town of Weymouth, where she grew up; her dizzying first years in New York where she broke into journalism; the rich process of establishing a new home for her dual-national son in London. Along the way, she gradually reckons with the complex legacy of her parents. Home/Land is a stirring inquiry into how to be present where we are, while never forgetting where we have been.
"Unfailingly insightful, precise, and well written...[Mead] traces her family history from its humble origins...through a series of different London abodes, elegantly weaving in the larger socio-economic and urban-planning contexts of the storied city...A contemplative memoir about one writer's return to a homeland that no longer feels like home." - Kirkus Reviews
"[A] vivid, searching memoir...[Mead's] prose is razor-sharp, and her story is deeply personal but universal in its explorations: 'A relationship with a place, like a relationship with a person, is made up of many threads of connection.' The result is poignant and memorable." - Publishers Weekly
"This thoughtful book will appeal to memoir readers, especially anyone who has moved or who has thought about what it would be like to live in a totally different city." - Library Journal
"In her work at the New Yorker, Rebecca Mead has so often turned her wry, generous, graceful, and precise attention to the lives of others — here, in this winsome memoir of departure and reversal, it's such a pleasure to read her excavating her own roots. Home/Land is about unexpected mobility, about historical chance and accident, about the way a series of unknowns accrue into a life; above all, it demonstrates the way displacement and longing has shaped Mead's manner of seeing into a profound gift." - Jia Tolentino, author of Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion
"It might seem peculiar to describe a book as at once digressive and rigorous, but Rebecca Mead's superb Home/Land somehow manages the trick. This is an elegant, graceful and poignant memoir about decision and happenstance—a reflection upon what we inherit and what we assemble, and how the accidents of our days give way to a life of shapeliness and coherence." - Gideon Lewis-Kraus, author of A Sense of Direction
"Compassionate, witty, at moments wonderfully exuberant, and at others, melancholy and wistful. Home/Land is a stirring book of memories and meditations, filled with the wild beauty of the English coast, the noise of SoHo's streets, and the great literature that captures the spirit of getting lost and finding home. Rebecca Mead made me fall in love with London and, at the same time, fall back in love with New York." - Merve Emre, author of The Personality Brokers
This information about Home/Land was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Rebecca Mead has been a staff writer at the New Yorker since 1997. She has profiled many subjects and has contributed more than two hundred pieces to the Talk of the Town. She is the author of One Perfect Day and My Life in Middlemarch, a New York Times bestseller. She has served as a McGraw Professor of Writing at Princeton University and is the recipient of a 2020 Guggenheim Fellowship. She lives in London.
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