Kate Christensen - Böcker

“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 PostFrom the PEN-Faulkner Award-winning author of The Great Man comes a poignant family drama 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 women's fiction 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 in this compelling homecoming story.

“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 PostFrom the PEN-Faulkner Award-winning author of The Great Man comes a poignant family drama 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 women's fiction 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 in this compelling homecoming story.

From the brilliant Kate Christensen, winner of the PEN/Faulkner award for The Great Man, comes a compelling, searing, funny novel about women, sex, power, and self-reckoning.Ever since her father broke her heart when she was nine, Julia Heimdahl has tried to be good company for bad men: a jovial drinking companion, an easygoing, witty non-complainer, one of the boys. Now a literary novelist in late middle age and late mid-career, she is at a moment of crisis, although she doesn’t know it yet. The novel takes place over the course of a weekend-long book festival at Baldwin College, which happens to be Julia’s alma mater, where she has come to promote her recently published memoir. She’s been placed on a panel with a fellow memoirist named Ellis Blackwell, a man so outrageously flirtatious and fawningly flattering, Julia is almost too disarmed to recognize how dangerous he is. Interweaving excerpts from Julia's memoir with her encounters with important people from her past—the woman she was in love with in college, her old New York mentor, her male editor, her literary nemesis, a former graduate student—Good Company examines what it really means to be “good company" as Julia faces her demons and comes to terms with what she really wants from sex, life, and work.