“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 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.

Sydney's fluid prose lures you into 19182 Penobscot Road, a house of horror like no other, as his narrator Chris--a character who compels and repels at once, both knowing and unknowable--probes its many dark corners for answers and salvation. Welcome Home is authentic, engrossing, disturbing, challenging, and brilliant. I've been in jealous awe since I finished reading it. -- Joseph Miller, Screenwriter and Author

When Willa and Ben's family moves to Chincoteague Island to open a bed-and-breakfast, the siblings are unsure if it will ever feel like home.

There is a serial killer on the loose, torturing and butchering his way across the North of England. In the quiet Cheshire village of Taupington, Victoria Wheatcroft has found the house of her dreams. But the house holds more than simply memories, and the serial killer, and her own past, are closing in...

Keep life simple, safe. Avoid risks. Annie Marsh learned that the hard way when she was just a kid. So what possessed her to forget those rules for one night with Reservist Drew Vincent? Could've been the fact he was shipping out the next day. Regardless, next thing Annie knows, she's a new mommy…and her son's daddy is missing and presumed dead. That is, until two-plus years later when she answers her front door. Turns out Drew is not only very much alive, he's about to discover he's a dad. And that initial spark between Annie and Drew? It's on the verge of becoming all-consuming. But how can she trust her heart and her son to a man who risks his life every day?

A captivating, deeply affecting memoir chronicling a journey from a Hollywood childhood as the son of a fading show business figure to a bohemian life in Europe and back to his native state of California, where the author must face the man who had driven him away. Summoned from abroad to attend to the ninety-four-year-old father he’s never been close to, writer and musician Tony Cohan finds himself reliving his own peripatetic life—a kaleidoscopic odyssey from California’s sunny postwar promise through the burnt end of the 1960s to the final days of the last century. An engrossing investigation of memory and identity, love and desire, art and fate, Native State vividly portrays the author’s attempts to escape the confines of a celebrity-filled, alcoholic family through music, writing, and travel. His descent into the colorful milieus of musical and literary geniuses and lowlifes, divas and crooks, fortune tellers and culture gods in Paris, Tangier, London, Copenhagen, Barcelona, San Francisco, Kyoto, and Los Angeles coalesces into a distinctive, intimate depiction of a pivotal cultural era. Throughout, Cohan brilliantly interweaves and contrasts his past experiences with his present-day reflections on the universal youthful desire to flee home and family, and the simultaneous “undertow of origins” urging a return. The result is a work that combines unusually rich storytelling with extraordinary literary quality. Poignant, elegantly crafted, and often funny, Native State is an indelible portrait of the artist as a young man, and—as son and dying father grope toward acceptance—a coming-to-terms with self, family, origins, and the elusive American idea of home.

Why does Pilgrims Passage matter? Why can greed and deceit still manipulate us? Why do people choose power over family? Working to address these questions and more, Pilgrims Passage: Into a New Millennium and Rebuilding the Past are journeys brimming with adventures through turbulent times during the transition into the twenty-first century. For Paul Bardeck and Claudia Weiss, discovering a thousand-year-old monks journal fuels their quest to rebuild a mysterious ancient monastery perched upon the foothills in the Slovakian High Tatras, with the promise of releasing boundless energy stored within ancient ruins, as well as the Book of ONE. Concurrently, Karl Vlodas seemingly unquenchable thirst for wealth and power, fueled by the Black Star Pacts dark energy, seems to make the quest for ancient truths a sideshow. As the pilgrims paths entangle, will the promise of timely truths finally come to light? Does standing against the powers of darkness really matter today?