A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice A dazzling debut collection spanning a century of Black American and Afro-Latino life in Puerto Rico, Pittsburgh, Louisiana, Miami, and beyond—and an evocative meditation on belonging, the meaning of home, and how we secure freedom on our own terms Profoundly moving and powerful, the stories in When Trying to Return Home dig deeply into the question of belonging. A young woman is torn between overwhelming love for her mother and the need to break free from her damaging influence during a desperate and disastrous attempt to rescue her brother from foster care. A man, his wife, and his mistress each confront the borders separating love and hate, obligation and longing, on the eve of a flight to San Juan. A college student grapples with the space between chivalry and machismo in a tense encounter involving a nun. And in 1930s Louisiana, a woman attempting to find a place to call her own chances upon an old friend at a bar and must reckon with her troubled past. Forming a web of desires and consequences that span generations, McCauley’s Black American and Afro–Puerto Rican characters remind us that these voices have always been here, occupying the very center of American life—even if we haven’t always been willing to listen.

A moving reflection on the complicated nature of home and homeland, and the heartache and adventure of leaving an adopted country in order to return to your native land—this is a “winsome memoir of departure and reversal . . . about the way a series of unknowns accrue into a life” (Jia Tolentino, author of Trick Mirror). When the New Yorker writer Rebecca Mead relocated to her birth city, London, with her family in the summer of 2018, she was both fleeing the political situation in America and seeking to expose her son to a wider world. With a keen sense of what she’d given up as she left New York, her home of thirty years, she tried to knit herself into the fabric of a changed London. The move raised poignant questions about place: What does it mean to leave the place you have adopted as home and country? And what is the value and cost of uprooting yourself? In a deft mix of memoir and reportage, drawing on literature and art, recent and ancient history, and the experience of encounters with individuals, environments, and landscapes in New York City and in England, Mead artfully explores themes of identity, nationality, and inheritance. She recounts her time in the coastal town of Weymouth, where she grew up; her dizzying first years in New York where she broke into journalism; the rich process of establishing a new home for her dual-national son in London. Along the way, she gradually reckons with the complex legacy of her parents. Home/Land is a stirring inquiry into how to be present where we are, while never forgetting where we have been.

This volume is a unique effort to cover the topic of the restitution of housing and property in light of lessons learned in the Balkans, South Africa, East Timor, and in a range of other countries that have made the shift from conflict to peace. Individual chapters by authors with direct experience dealing with housing and property restitution in particular contexts will bring into focus the legal and human rights aspects of this question. All parties involved in human rights, refugee assistance, post-conflict reconstruction and reconciliation, and property rights will find this volume to be an indispensable resource now that housing and property restitution is viewed as an essential element of post-conflict reconstruction and a primary means of reversing “ethnic cleansing.”

A chilling ghost story with a twist: the New York Times bestselling author of The Winter People returns to the woods of Vermont to tell the story of a husband and wife who don't simply move into a haunted house--they build one . . . In a quest for a simpler life, Helen and Nate have abandoned the comforts of suburbia to take up residence on forty-four acres of rural land where they will begin the ultimate, aspirational do-it-yourself project: building the house of their dreams. When they discover that this beautiful property has a dark and violent past, Helen, a former history teacher, becomes consumed by the local legend of Hattie Breckenridge, a woman who lived and died there a century ago. With her passion for artifacts, Helen finds special materials to incorporate into the house--a beam from an old schoolroom, bricks from a mill, a mantel from a farmhouse--objects that draw her deeper into the story of Hattie and her descendants, three generations of Breckenridge women, each of whom died suspiciously. As the building project progresses, the house will become a place of menace and unfinished business: a new home, now haunted, that beckons its owners and their neighbors toward unimaginable danger.

In the latest thriller from New York Times bestseller Riley Sager, a woman returns to the house made famous by her father’s bestselling horror memoir. Is the place really haunted by evil forces, as her father claimed? Or are there more earthbound—and dangerous—secrets hidden within its walls? What was it like? Living in that house. Maggie Holt is used to such questions. Twenty-five years ago, she and her parents, Ewan and Jess, moved into Baneberry Hall, a rambling Victorian estate in the Vermont woods. They spent three weeks there before fleeing in the dead of night, an ordeal Ewan later recounted in a nonfiction book called House of Horrors. His tale of ghostly happenings and encounters with malevolent spirits became a worldwide phenomenon, rivaling The Amityville Horror in popularity—and skepticism. Today, Maggie is a restorer of old homes and too young to remember any of the events mentioned in her father's book. But she also doesn’t believe a word of it. Ghosts, after all, don’t exist. When Maggie inherits Baneberry Hall after her father's death, she returns to renovate the place to prepare it for sale. But her homecoming is anything but warm. People from the past, chronicled in House of Horrors, lurk in the shadows. And locals aren’t thrilled that their small town has been made infamous thanks to Maggie’s father. Even more unnerving is Baneberry Hall itself—a place filled with relics from another era that hint at a history of dark deeds. As Maggie experiences strange occurrences straight out of her father’s book, she starts to believe that what he wrote was more fact than fiction.

Each year millions of American adults visit a childhood home. Few can anticipate the effect it will have on them. Often serving several important psychological needs, these trips are not intended as visits with people from their past. Rather, those returning to their homes have a strong desire to visit the places that comprised the landscape of their childhood. Approximately one third of American adults over the age of thirty have visited a childhood home. This book describes some of their experiences and the psychology behind the journeys. Most people who visit a childhood home are motivated by a desire to connect with their past. Seeing the buildings, schools, parks, and playgrounds from their youth helps to establish the psychological and emotional link between the child in the black-and-white photographs and the person they are today. Many people use the trip to get in touch with the values and principles they were taught as children, often as a means to get their lives back on track. Others use that journey to strengthen emotional bonds between themselves and loved ones. Still others return to former homes to work through psychological issues left over from sad or traumatic childhoods. No matter the reason, there are few experiences in one's life that can move a person as deeply and unpredictably as returning home.

Now a Major Motion Picture Directed by American Sniper Writer Jason Hall and Starring Miles Teller No journalist has reckoned with the psychology of war as intimately as David Finkel. In The Good Soldiers, his bestselling account from the front lines of Baghdad, Finkel embedded with the men of the 2-16 Infantry Battalion as they carried out the infamous “surge”. Now, in Thank You for Your Service, Finkel tells the true story of those men as they return home from the front-lines of Baghdad and struggle to reintegrate--both into their family lives and into American society at large. Finkel is with these veterans in their most intimate, painful, and hopeful moments as they try to recover, and in doing so, he creates an indelible, essential portrait of what life after war is like--not just for these soldiers, but for their wives, widows, children, and friends, and for the professionals who are truly trying, and to a great degree failing, to undo the damage that has been done. Thank You for Your Service is an act of understanding, and it offers a more complete picture than we have ever had of two essential questions: When we ask young men and women to go to war, what are we asking of them? And when they return, what are we thanking them for? “Finkel sketches a panoramic view of postwar life....A book that every American should read.” —Jake Tapper, Los Angeles Times Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the New York Public Library Helen Bernstein Award for Excellence in Journalism. One of Ten Favorite Books of 2013 by Michiko Kakutani (The New York Times), a Washington Post Top Ten Book of the Year, and a New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year