Home can be the place a person come from, the place they long to escape, and the place that continues to shape them long after they have left. In Douglas Stuart’s John of John, Cal returns to the remote Isle of Harris and to his father, whose expectations of his son clash with Cal’s struggle between who he is and the life he wants. In Tayari Jones’s Kin, two women raised together in a small Louisiana town find their lives pulled apart by family, loss, ambition, and the search for belonging. Stuart and Jones explore the ties that bind us to family—and the secrets, absences, and inherited expectations that can make those ties both suffocating and sustaining. Together, these novels ask what happens when we leave the places that shape us, and what it means to return to them changed. Moderated by writer and curator Greg Mania (Born to Be Public).
Menu
