Perennial – serie

“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.

"Splendid . . . what really sells this imaginative, scary, verge-of-growing-up tale is its characters, each with a distinct voice and personality. . . . Kois' surprising second novel is a natural for fans of the character-based horror fiction of Grady Hendrix or Paul Tremblay and will win him a whole new sphere of readers." —Booklist"Marvelous, tender, and unpredictable, Hampton Heights captures the uncanniness and discomfort of early adolescence. There’s a pinch of Ray Bradbury, a soupçon of Stephen King, a dash of fairy tale logic, but Dan Kois makes something entirely his own out of this familiar and always pleasurable territory."—Kelly Link, author of The Book of Love"Like Stand by Me mixed with Stranger Things and The Twilight Zone, Hampton Heights is a rollicking chronicle of youth set loose among mystery and monsters. Dan Kois deftly conjures a boundless world that's chilling, wondrous, and delightful."—Adam Sternbergh, author of The Eden TestFrom the author of the Washington Post notable novel Vintage Contemporaries, something completely unexpected: a hair-raising and rollicking supernatural adventure set on one night in 1987, when six paperboys must confront a slew of monsters as well as their own personal demons in a haunted Midwestern neighborhood.On a cold winter’s evening in 1987, six middle-school paperboys wander an unfamiliar Milwaukee neighborhood, selling newspaper subscriptions, fueled by their manager Kevin’s promises of cash bonuses and dinner at Burger King. But in this thrilling coming of age horror tale, the freaks come out at night in Hampton Heights. Sent out into the neighborhood in pairs, the boys will encounter a host of primordial monsters—and triumph over them.Sigmone, who is bussed to a white school, is stuck with Joel, a white kid who idolizes Black culture. Mark, who's wrestling with his sexuality, joins his secret crush, Ryan. Nishu and Al are outsiders; one is a second-generation immigrant, the other a poor kid in a rich school. Over the course of one eventful evening, the three pairs will encounter the wild things of Hampton Heights in this urban fantasy—werewolves, witches with a centuries-old story to tell, and a creepy, ancient monster who feeds on memories. Meanwhile, Kevin is having an adventure of his own, seducing a beautiful woman in the neighborhood’s tavern . . . but who is actually in control?Funny, thrilling, outrageous, and sneakily beautiful, Dan Kois’s Hampton Heights is a perfect slice of 80s nostalgia that captures without sentimentality the dreams and fears of teenage boys in a tender horror-comedy about camaraderie, bravery, vulnerability, and the terrifying prospect of growing up.