A.M. Homes – författare

THE END OF ALICE treads the wafer-thin line between the evil and the everyday, following the correspondence of two paedophiles. One, the narrator, is a child-killer, serving his twenty-third year in prison. The other, his seemingly sweet admirer, is a nineteen-year-old woman, intent on seducing a young neighbourhood boy. Teetering on the knife's edge between the American Dream and the American Nightmare, THE END OF ALICE unpicks the darkness of inconceivable desire, and the destruction and horror left in its wake.

The Big Guy loves his family, money and democracy. Undone by the results of the 2008 Presidential election, he taps a group of like-minded men to reclaim their version of America. As they build a scheme to disturb and disrupt, the Big Guy also faces turbulence within his family and must take responsibility for his past actions. For his wife and daughter are having their own awakenings: self-denying Charlotte enters rehab, and eighteen year old Megan, who has voted for the first time, explores a political future that deviates from her father's ideology, while delving into deeply buried family secrets.Dark, funny and prescient, The Unfolding explores the implosion of the dream and how we arrived in today's divided world.

WINNER OF THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 'Reads like a brilliant miniseries ... has the narrative intensity of Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections and the emotional punch of Siri Hustvedt's What I Loved.' Observer Harold Silver has spent a lifetime watching his taller, smarter, and more successful younger brother George acquire a covetable wife, two kids, and a beautiful home in New York City. But Harry also knows his brother has a murderous temper. When George loses control the result is an act of violence so shocking that both brothers are hurled into entirely new lives in which they both must seek absolution.Suddenly Harry finds himself playing parent to his brother's two adolescent children, tumbling down a rabbit hole of online sex, and dealing with aging parents who move through life like travellers on a fantastic voyage. And he is forced to confront the ways in which our histories can either compel us to repeat our mistakes - or become the catalyst for change.May We Be Forgiven is a darkly funny tale exploring how one deeply fractured family might begin to put itself back together. 'An unflinching account of a catastrophic, violent, black-comic, transformative year in the history of one broken American family. Flat-out amazing' Salman Rushdie

On the day that A. M. Homes was born in 1961, she was given up for adoption. Her birth parents were a twenty-two year old woman and an older married man with whom she was having an affair. Thirty years later, out of the blue, Homes was contacted by a lawyer on behalf of her birth mother, and they began to correspond; her biological father contacted her soon after. These two individuals and their effect on the adult Homes are strange and unexpected, and the story spirals into something utterly raw and hilarious, heartbreaking and absurd. Along the way, Homes describes the clash between her childhood fantasies of her birth parents and the disappointing reality. She writes about the experience of experiencing biological resemblance for the first time (in 'My Father's Ass') and the addictiveness of the genealogical research she embarks on. She reflects on the significance of DNA testing and having two mothers and two fathers and unearths profound truths about her family and herself. Finally, she writes movingly about her own baby daughter and the way she has recently helped to mend Homes' fractured life.

WINNER OF THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 'Reads like a brilliant miniseries... Has the narrative intensity of Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections and the emotional punch of Siri Hustvedt's What I Loved' Observer Harold Silver has spent a lifetime watching his taller, smarter, and more successful younger brother George acquire a covetable wife, two kids, and a beautiful home in New York City. But Harry also knows his brother has a murderous temper. When George loses control the result is an act of violence so shocking that both brothers are hurled into entirely new lives in which they both must seek absolution.Suddenly Harry finds himself playing parent to his brother's two adolescent children, tumbling down a rabbit hole of online sex, and dealing with aging parents who move through life like travellers on a fantastic voyage. And he is forced to confront the ways in which our histories can either compel us to repeat our mistakes - or become the catalyst for change.May We Be Forgiven is a darkly funny tale exploring how one deeply fractured family might begin to put itself back together. 'An unflinching account of a catastrophic, violent, black-comic, transformative year in the history of one broken American family. Flat-out amazing' Salman Rushdie

A fantastic new collection of short stories from one of America's greatest writers

'Breathtakingly accurate satire and laser-cut portraits of American life from a seriously heavyweight author whose snapshots remain etched on the retinas' Evening Standard '...a writer to go travelling with on the journey called life' Jeanette Winterson'...one of our most important and original writers of fiction' Jay McInerney'Ms. Homes just gets better and better' Gary Shteyngart'a provocative and eloquent writer, and her vision of the way we live now is anything but safe' Meg Wolitzer''Homes is a devastating satirist..' Lionel Shriver'at her merciless satirical best' Tessa Hadley'These defiantly comic stories are like postcards from contemporary America' Summer Books round up, Mail on Sunday The winner of the Women's Prize for Fiction returns with signature humour and psychological accuracy, to tell thirteen stories exposing the heart of an uneasy 21st-century America. In tales of a family obsessed with the surfaces of their lives, or the story of a shopper who suddenly finds himself nominated to run for President, she explores our attachments to each other through characters who aren't quite who they hoped to become, though there is no one else they can be. Her first book since the Women's Prize-winning May We Be Forgiven, Days of Awe is another visionary, fearless and outrageously funny work from a master storyteller.

Paul and Elaine have two boys and a beautiful home, yet they find themselves thoroughly, inexplicably stuck. Obsessed with 'making things good again', they spin the quiet terrors of family life into a fantastical frenzy that careers well and truly out of control. As A.M. Homes's incendiary novel unfolds, the technicolour hues of the American good life become nearly hallucinogenic: from a strange and hilarious encounter on the floor of the pantry with a Stepford Wife neighbour, to a house-cleaning team in space suits, to a hostage situation at the school. Homes lays bare the foundations of marriage and family life and creates characters outrageously flawed, deeply human and entirely believable.

For Claire Roth, an established psychotherapist with an adoring husband and children, her new patient - Jody Goodman, a witty and attractive young filmmaker - is a welcome diversion from her predictable life. Jody, successful, yet uncertain, is disarmed by Claire's interest and approval. Gradually, the boundaries between friendship and family, between love and compulsion, start to blur - especially when one of them starts to believe fanatically that some things simply cannot be coincidences, and that what they share, in fact, is the deepest bond of all. In a Country of Mothers is a transfixing psychological thriller, and with it A.M. Homes forces us to confront our own judgements about sanity, danger and desire.

Things You Should Know is a collection of dazzling stories by one of the most talented and daring young American writers, whose distinctive narratives demonstrate how extraordinary the ordinary can be. A woman pursues an unconventional strategy for getting pregnant; a former First Lady shows despair and courage in dealing with her husband's Alzheimer's; a teacher's list of 'things you already should know but maybe are a little dumb, so you don't' becomes an obsession for someone who wasn't at school the day it was given out; and adult tragedy intrudes into a childhood friendship. The stories are full of magic and strangeness and humour, but also demonstrate an uncanny emotional accuracy and compassion.

The stories in The Safety of Objects are both bizarre and believable, very funny but also frightening and sad. A girl's blonde Barbie doll seduces her teenage brother in an intense episode of erotic obsession; a couple go off the rails and smoke crack while their children are staying with their grandmother; and a lawyer seeks revenge on his boss by urinating into his potted plant every evening.

Jack is a teenager who wants nothing more than to be normal - even if being normal means having divorced parents and a rather strange best friend. But when Jack's father takes him out rowing on a lake and tells his son that he's gay, nothing will ever be normal again. Out of Jack's struggle to redefine 'family', comes a work of enormous humour, charm and resonance, the most convincing, funny and insightful novel about adolescence since The Catcher in the Rye.

This Book Will Save Your Life is an uplifting story about one man's efforts to bring himself back to life. Richard is a modern-day everyman, a middle-aged divorcee trading stocks out of his home in Los Angeles who needs no one. His life has slowed almost to a standstill until two incidents conspire to hurl him back into the world. One day he wakes up with a knotty cramp in his back, which rapidly develops into an all-consuming pain. At the same time a wide sinkhole appears outside his living-room window, threatening the foundations of his house. A vivid novel about compassion and transformation, This Book Will Save Your Life reveals what can happen if you are willing to open yourself up to the world around you. Since her debut in 1989, A. M. Homes has been among the boldest and most original voices of her generation, acclaimed for the psychological accuracy and unnerving emotional intensity of her storytelling. Her keen ability to explore how extraordinary the ordinary can be is at the heart of this touching and funny novel, which was shortlisted for the Richard & Judy Book Club in 2007.

The dazzling new state-of-the-nation novel from one of America's most significant contemporary writers and winner of the Women's Prize for May We Be Forgiven, which explores the makings of our political times.