Home/Land

A Memoir of Departure and Return

By: Rebecca Mead

Narrated by: Rebecca Mead

Length: 7 hrs and 13 mins

Publisher's summary

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.

©2022 Rebecca Mead (P)2022 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

“A timely and powerful read . . . Clear and profound . . . Home/Land certainly has a memento mori quality, but it’s not depressing. In embracing the complexities and paradoxes of home and belonging, Mead also finds solace, even joy. She captures brilliantly the bittersweetness of being far from home. . . . Even for those who stay put, which is to say most of us for the last two years, Home/Land is a remarkable exploration of how being mindful of the past can enrich and imbue with urgency our everyday lives.”—Charles Arrowsmith, Los Angeles Times

“Exquisite detail . . . [With] many arresting images and diverting anecdotes . . . [Mead] has an exacting eye and a gift for trenchant phrasing.”—Becca Rothfeld, The New York Times

“Beautifully written . . . [Mead’s] non-linear approach never disorientates — rather, it invigorates, creating as it does a rich patchwork of overlapping ideas and recollections. . . . This is an artfully crafted memoir which offers a clear-eyed examination of home, roots, belonging, and personal and national identity.”—Malcolm Forbes, Star Tribune

Lyrical and moving

This is a splendid book!
Anyone who has left home for another country, or another part of your home country, will identify with Mead’s insights and yearning. I loved her book on “Middlemarch” and so tried this one - it is similarly profound and funny and thought-provoking.