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A Novel
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.
"Christensen is a psychological Geiger-counter, registering every particle of emotion; a wizard at dialogue and redolent settings, and an intrepid choreographer of confoundment. From gasp-inducing absurdities and betrayals to a profound sense of our paralysis in the glare of climate change to a full-on embrace of family, love, home, and decency, Christensen's whirligig tale leaves readers dizzy with fresh and provocative insights." —Booklist (starred review)
"Christensen skillfully portrays the issues at play in many families: there are deep bonds, but also deep resentments, 'volcanic' emotions, and decades-old misunderstandings. The character Lucie, an immature, thwarted tyrant, is particularly well drawn. Readers in search of an engrossing family drama will find much to like." —Publishers Weekly
"[S}mart yet unfocused." —Kirkus Reviews
"Few writers have a wit as razor sharp as Kate Christensen's ... . Her new novel follows an environmental journalist as she returns to her small Maine hometown after the death of her mother, and grapples with grief, family, and aging. I would trust no less deft a hand than Christensen's to manage the balance of humor, devastation, and squabbling." —Literary Hub
"A satisfying, intimate novel about complicated people at middle age, coming to terms with lost love, and the ghosts who shaped your life." —Boston Globe
"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
"A fantastic study in loss—the grief kind and the yearning too, oh my god the yearning! Plus menopause. Plus Portland, Maine. I loved it." —Catherine Newman, author of We All Want Impossible Things
This information about Welcome Home, Stranger 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.
Photo © Ronnie Farley
Kate Christensen is the author of eight novels, most recently Welcome Home, Stranger. Her fourth novel, The Great Man, won the 2008 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. She has also published two food-centric memoirs, Blue Plate Special and How to Cook a Moose, which won the 2016 Maine Literary Award for Memoir. Her essays, reviews, and short pieces have appeared in a wide variety of publications and anthologies. She lives with her husband and their two dogs in Taos, New Mexico.
Author Interview
Link to Kate Christensen's Website
Name Pronunciation
Kate Christensen: Chris-ten-sen
Happy Land
by Dolen Perkins-Valdez
From the New York Times bestselling author, a novel about a family's secret ties to a vanished American Kingdom.
The only real blind person at Christmas-time is he who has not Christmas in his heart.
Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!
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