Welcome Home, Stranger

A Novel

By: Kate Christensen

Narrated by: Xe Sands

“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 Post

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.

©2023 Kate Christensen (P)2023 HarperCollins Publishers

I didn't get it

Is it strange that i chose some books by who narrates it? I love Xe Sands, and her voice is the best thing about this book. I felt the story was rambling and pointless. Maybe it was just too deep for me.

Bland

There just wasn’t much to the story. I expected something more at the end, but I did finish it.

It ended too soon!

What a wonderful, rich, textured story about grown sisters overcoming a deeply flawed mother. Xe Sands gives her usual stellar narration. Highly recommend!

Great narrator

Finally an adult female narrator that doesn’t sound like a child! A chirpy adult child that’s loathsome to hear read a serious novel. The story is about careers, relationships, looking back over life choices good & bad & looking forward when the future isn’t what you expected.

Great descriptions

As a Mainer, loved the accurate depiction of places familiar to me. Only Damariscotta was pronounced incorrectly. :) Narrator was a bit too much at times. Story was melancholy and heart wrenching, ending was suitable to the story. Not everyone will like this story. I did.

Great story and characters. Not so great a reader.

The story was great. Interesting characters. The reader’s voice was grating— almost as if she didn’t have the energy to croak the words out. I wish I had read it rather than listened to it.

great narrator

I kept waiting for it to get better. it's an okay read. I finished it but I wish better things would have happened for the main character.

Well written but depressing

This book was well written, but the characters, with the exception of the protagonist, were not well-drawn enough for me, and the overall feeling was depressing. The little bit of hope at the end was not worth it. I found the narrator’s style distracting and difficult to understand at times.

Simply told, but heartrending and profound

If you’ve had mental illness in your family, especially a mother, as I have had, this book will make you think of things you haven’t thought of in a long time in a different light.  This is a story of two sisters, bound together by a brutal childhood, who somehow survived, and thrived in their own way. They are both able to look back on things at an older age from a different perspective.
Excellently drawn characters, engaging plot, gave me a lot to think about. I’ve recommended this book to other friends and I might read it again myself. Beautifully performed.


Terrific

Beautiful language. Evolution of a life in a few weeks from one of urban striving solitude to a new future of flawed family and change for the better?