Going Home

One of the Observer's Debut Novels of 2024

De: Tom Lamont

Narrado por: Jot Davies

'A spirit-lifting debut'
DAVID MITCHELL

'I will never forget these characters: so pained and funny, so brilliantly drawn, wrestled with and forgiven'
HELEN GARNER

'Meltingly warm'
OBSERVER

Local boy Téo Erskine is back in the north London suburb of his youth, visiting his father - stubborn, selfish, complicated Vic. Things have changed for Téo: he's got a steady job, a brand-new car and a London flat all concrete and glass, with a sliver of a river view.

Except, underneath the surface, not much has changed at all. He's still the boy seeking his father's approval; the young man playing late-night poker with his best friend, unreliable, infuriating Ben Mossam; the one still desperately in love with the enigmatic Lia Woods.

Lia's life, on the other hand, has been transformed: now a single mum to two-year-old Joel, she doesn't have time for anyone - not even herself.

When the unthinkable happens, Joel finds himself at the centre of an odd constellation of men - Téo, Vic, Ben - none of whom is fully equipped to look after him, but whose strange, tentative attempts at love might just be enough to offer him a new place to call home.©2024 Tom Lamont

Reseñas de la Crítica

Exceptionally touching . . . Lamont shows his talent for revealing the depth of the characters' feelings through their small, quotidian joys and tragedies . . . funny and poignant, bittersweet and moving - yet never maudlin . . . Going Home made me cry on more than one occasion, and laugh out loud many more times. It's a terrific reminder that what binds us to our loved ones isn't blood but the care we take to keep them close, and our ability to show up for them when we screw it up on the first go-round. (Isaac Fitzgerald)

Gently comic, bittersweet (The best fiction of 2024)

Three men become responsible for a motherless toddler. In an unsentimental evocation of fatherhood and male friendship, this novel explores the glory and sacrifice involved in learning to love (Best books of 2024)

I've read Going Home twice now and I still don't feel as if I've tapped its power. Children seem to be more alive than adults, keener, less jaded, and this novel feels the same, pepped up and gorgeous, just bristling with life (Olivia Laing)

Someone put Tom Lamont's Going Home in my hand the other day and I was soon involved in his lovely, exact sentences and perceptions, building a poignant and generous story about some men looking after a baby (Books of the year, picked by Tessa Hadley)

Lamont's debut is shrewd, heartfelt and witty, and his cast of Londoners feel intensely real (The 75 hottest books of the year so far)

A different kind of love story, beautifully told . . . An obvious parallel might be the work of Jon McGregor . . . [it] restored my faith in wholesome novelistic pleasures that work well in good hands but have failed to excite me in recent novels. Several point-of-view narrators are inhabited dutifully, and equally; there's a concentrated locality, many corners of which are shown love and illuminated; a culture; a strong social element, played without manipulative cynicism. There are rolling banks of nice sentences and dialogue that sounds like real speech without sacrificing shape or dynamism. Going Home has the lot. It's been a while since I've read a piece of straightforward British realism and been this impressed.

Charm is an underrated quality in fiction . . . It comes from an alchemical blend of elements including narrative voice and character, and Tom Lamont's debut novel, Going Home, set in the Jewish community in Enfield, north London, has charm to burn . . . a book that succeeds so strongly through its charm and its heart (John Self)

A meltingly warm comedy centred on two old school pals recently turned 30 . . . While the testy male bonds at the book's heart supply plenty of laughter, the book owes its generous humour not to gags, but tone, which gives it an equally light hand with any number of unfunny subjects (10 best new novelists for 2024)

A beautiful, funny tale of London and lives new and old (Jonathan Dean)