The Books Briefing: What Does Home Mean to You?

“My home was not simply a house or a town but, more importantly, an awakening story,” Chinua Achebe writes in his memoir Home and Exile.

For Achebe, this realization was part of what motivated his work: He saw that Africa’s image in the eyes of the world had been shaped by a colonial narrative, and set out to write novels and criticism that helped convey a more accurate picture of the continent. Many other authors also find inspiration in the idea of homes and homelands, exploring the complex and bittersweet associations of the places people leave behind or choose to make their own.

In her short-story collection, How to Love a Jamaican, Alexia Arthurs follows characters across the island and throughout its diaspora to capture what a Jamaican identity can mean. Dance of the Happy Shades, Alice Munro’s debut story collection, has a memorable setting that’s influenced by the author’s own rural Ontario hometown, and features protagonists reckoning with the confines of domestic life.

The recently divorced narrator of Rachel Cusk’s novel Transit struggles with feelings of vulnerability while her fixer-upper house is dismantled and rebuilt around her. And the single mother in Yuko Tsushima’s Territory of Light builds a new home for her daughter in a small, light-filled apartment that she hopes will protect them both.

​

Every Friday in the Books Briefing, we thread together Atlantic stories on books that share similar ideas.

Know other book lovers who might like this guide? Forward them this email.

What We’re Reading

Revisiting the rural towns in Alice Munro’s debut

“In a setting where many homes lack electricity or running water, many men still make a living off the land, and many housewives must jar their own preserves, Munro’s female protagonists often confront expectations that seem as old, and firmly rooted, as the landscape itself.”