This Place You Return To Is Home - Softcover

With just two novels, the author of Rain and The Keepsake has received international acclaim and established herself as a uniquely powerful, evocative, and significant voice-"a young master," in the words of the Los Angeles Times. Now Kirsty Gunn gives us a collection of short stories that astonishes with the resonant spareness and lyricism of her craft.

In these stories, mothers escape to remote country villages, making prisoners of their children. A young man is made an indentured servant by his father, his violence atoning for loneliness. A wife comes to fear the closeness of her own husband's attentions. Haunted by the past, these stories explore the paradox of home as a place of both departure and return, comprising a range of voices portrayed with breathtaking skill. This Place You Return To Is Home cements Kirsty Gunn's reputation as one of our most talented writers.

Kirsty Gunn is the author of two novels, Rain and The Keepsake. This is her first collection of short stories. She lives in London and Scotland.

Praise for This Place You Return To Is Home:

"A haunting debut collection . . . weird and remarkably affecting . . . A small gem."-Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

A haunting debut collection of 11 stories by New Zealand novelist Gunn (Rain, 1995), most of them portraying unhappy families on the run. It was a part of the country you forgot about until you were back in the middle of it. From that opening line , Gunn makes her territory clear: the backwoods of New Zealand is the destination of most of her characters as they attempt to escape into the past. The usual protagonists are young mothers bailing out of bad marriages, like the heroine of Not That Much t o Go On, who abandons her husband and takes her two daughters to live in her dead mothers house in the countryside. Eventually, the children find their mothers liberation as constricting as she found her marriage, and they become objects of pity for the l ocals as they fantasize about being reunited with their father in the city. The young couple of Everyone is Sleeping is just as malcontent: they go out to the country to visit the wifes childhood home and suddenly find themselves overcome by an inexplicab le dread. The young waitress of Visitor also goes home to the country to visit her elderly aunt Eila and finds herself suddenly overwhelmed by the falsity of her sophisticated city life, while the son of The Meatyard, who agrees to house-sit his fathers r anch, is worn down by boredom and resentment. The title story, a grown womans recollections of her childhood in the country with her mother and sister, rounds out the collection with its portrait of the adult life of the daughter of the first story here. Grim, weird, and remarkably affecting: the sad nostalgia that permeates nearly every page (I remember these certain days when everything was bright) manages, in Gunns hands, to become compelling rather than depressing. A small gem. -- Copyright © 1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.