Home Leave, Brittani Sonnenberg
Home Leave, Brittani Sonnenberg
List: $24.98 | Sale: $17.49
Club: $12.49

Home Leave
A Novel

Author: Brittani Sonnenberg

Narrator: Leslie Bellair

Unabridged: 7 hr 18 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 06/03/2014

Synopsis

Brittani Sonnenberg's "emotionally charged" (Real Simple) debut novel following a family's search for home abroad is now in paperback.

Chris Kriegstein is a man on the move, with a career that catapults his family across the globe. For his wife, Elise, the hardship of chronic relocation is soothed by the allure of reinvention. But it's the Kriegstein daughters, Leah and Sophie, who face the most tumult. With each new move, the girls find they can count on only one thing: the consoling, confounding presence of each other.

When the family suffers an unimaginable loss, they can't help but wonder: Was it meant to be, or did one decision change their lives forever? Called "stark but sweet, warm and wise" by the Minneapolis Star Tribune, HOME LEAVE chases this wildly loveable family through the excitement and anguish of their journeys around the world.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Jess on March 26, 2017

Overall an okay read, but with a very disconnected structure and an inconsistent writing style. There was an anecdote here and there about a family member or a strange neighbour, that doesn't really amount to anything. You think it's foreshadowing or that we'll come back to it at some point, but you......more

Goodreads review by Brittany on June 07, 2023

Very slow and could not get into it. Was a DNF......more

Goodreads review by Maura on May 14, 2015

Home Leave is a deeply disorienting book, starting with the very first page. It took me longer than I’d like to admit (at least four pages) to realize that the opening chapter was narrated by ... a house? ... and then I went back to the beginning and started all over, wondering what I was in for. Th......more

Quotes

"HOME LEAVE is a rich, lively novel. Original in conception and set in various continents, it describes migrations as a contemporary existential condition. More importantly, it shows how this condition effects change, loss, and growth in the migrants. It offers many insights that are true."—Ha Jin, National Book Award winner for Waiting

"It's hard to believe that this astonishing novel is Brittani Sonnenberg's first--she writes about family with wisdom, humor, and native daring. Here is Persephone's journey, undertaken by an entire family, the Kriegsteins, who ricochet through time zones, moving from Berlin to Singapore to Wisconsin to Shanghai to Atlanta, together and alone. Sonnenberg's prose is so vital and so enchanting that you will read this book in the dilated state of a world-traveler, with all of your senses wide open. Her family members are so well-drawn and complex that you'll close this book certain they exist."—Karen Russell, author of Swamplandia! and Vampires in the Lemon Grove

"A captivating tour de force that follows a nomadic family across generations and continents."—filmmaker Wim Wenders

"Brittani Sonnenberg, like the best storytellers, shows us what we carry and what we leave behind as we travel across time zones (from America to Germany to Singapore), as we sit in airports, alone with the aloneness, as we love, live, grieve, and then try to live once more. Authentic, beautiful, bravely-told, HOME LEAVE is alive with characters you want to protect and hold-characters you won't want to leave behind."—Nami Mun, author of Miles from Nowhere

"HOME LEAVEis a remarkable debut, notable for the insightful intimacy of its characterization and a restless formal invention which perfectly evokes the uncertainties of expatriate life."—Peter Ho Davies, author of The Welsh Girl

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