The Year We Left Home: A Novel

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Hardcover: 336 pages
Publisher: Simon & Schuster (May 3, 2011)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1439175888
ISBN-13: 978-1439175880
Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.5 x 1.2 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)

Bookended by two wars—Vietnam and Iraq—Thompson's third novel (after the collection Do Not Deny Me) sketches the travails of an Iowa family over three decades. Matriarch Audrey neatly sums up the episodic novel's grand theme: "she'd been born into one world, hopeful and normal, and now she lived in another, full of sadness and failure." The novel opens as oldest daughter Anita, the beauty of the family, celebrates her marriage. Over the years, however, Anita confronts dissatisfaction with herself and disillusionment with her pompous husband. Her younger brother, Ryan, a high school senior as the novel opens, longs to escape his rural roots, dating a hippie poet and majoring in political science before realizing that the farmers who came before him might hold more relevance than he'd imagined. Cousin Chip comes back from Vietnam troubled and aimless, his wanderings from Seattle to Reno, Nev., to Veracruz, Mexico, offering a parallel to the spiritual restlessness all the other characters feel. Told from the point of view of more than a half-dozen characters, the vignettes that make up the narrative are generally powerful in isolation, but as a whole fail to develop into anything more than a series of snapshots of a family touched by time and tragedy. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved. Review “Dazzling . . . Unforgettable . . . A masterful wide-angle portrait of an Iowa family over three decades. . . . Thompson’s ability to put these characters empathically on the page, in their special setting, over an extended period of years, with just the right dose of dark humor, rivals Richard Russo’s. . . . The novel is a powerful reflection on middle American life—on the changes wrought by the passing years and the values that endure.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)“Jean Thompson writes with both sensitivity and intelligence, from a place of deep compassion for her characters and the world in which they live.” —Pam Houston, O, The Oprah Magazine“Few fiction writers working today have more successfully rendered the sensation of solid ground suddenly melting away, pinpointing that instant when the familiar present is swallowed up by an always encroaching past or voided future.” —Katherine Dieckmann, The New York Times Book Review“Precisely the kind of beautifully crafted, intelligent, imaginative writing that serious readers crave. . . . Each sentence deserves to be appreciated.” —Deirdre Donahue, USA Today“One of our most astute diagnosticians of contemporary experience, conflict, unhappiness, and regret.” —Bruce Allen, The Boston Globe“Superb . . . Finely crafted . . . Thompson’s pithy humor, redolent details, and knowing compassion have never been sharper or more resounding as her characters’ follies and struggles reveal depthless truths about men and women, families and vocations, the lure of away and the gravitational pull of home.” —Booklist (starred review) The Year We Left Home: A Novel