Increasingly worried by hardline conservative politics in the U.S., New Yorker staff writer Rebecca Mead (My Life in Middlemarch) and her American husband decided to pull up stakes and move back to London with their teenage son. In Home/Land, her third book, Mead writes thoughtfully about her travels back and forth across the Atlantic, and her choice to uproot herself and her family. "We choose to rock our own foundations," she writes. "We chose movement, because movement is a kind of freedom, too."
Mead delves into her youth on England's south coast, her family's working-class London roots, the two decades she spent in New York and the life she eventually built there. Along the way, she shares details about her family's history and the homes they occupied, detailing her own attempts to make a home first in Brooklyn and then in London.
An expert at living between two worlds, a professional observer, Mead wonders how this move will affect her son. She wants him to know "what it is to yearn for elsewhere," even while admitting her own ambivalence about both of her countries and her decision to return to England. She wants to give her son a sense of spaciousness, the freedom to move between two worlds, but also "this questionable gift: a lost place to long for." Meditative and moving, Mead's account will inspire readers to muse on their own lost places, and to think about what truly makes a home. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams