Home/Land Audiobook By Rebecca Mead cover art

Home/Land

A Memoir of Departure and Return

Preview

Try for $0.00
Prime logo Prime members: New to Audible?
Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
Premium Plus auto-renews for $14.95/mo after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Home/Land

By: Rebecca Mead
Narrated by: Rebecca Mead
Try for $0.00

$14.95/month after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Buy for $18.00

Buy for $18.00

Confirm purchase
Pay using card ending in
By confirming your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and Amazon's Privacy Notice. Taxes where applicable.
Cancel

About this listen

A moving reflection on the complicated nature of home and homeland, and the heartache and adventure of leaving an adopted country in order to return to your native land—this is a “winsome memoir of departure and reversal . . . about the way a series of unknowns accrue into a life” (Jia Tolentino, author of Trick Mirror).

When the New Yorker writer Rebecca Mead relocated to her birth city, London, with her family in the summer of 2018, she was both fleeing the political situation in America and seeking to expose her son to a wider world. With a keen sense of what she’d given up as she left New York, her home of thirty years, she tried to knit herself into the fabric of a changed London. The move raised poignant questions about place: What does it mean to leave the place you have adopted as home and country? And what is the value and cost of uprooting yourself?

In a deft mix of memoir and reportage, drawing on literature and art, recent and ancient history, and the experience of encounters with individuals, environments, and landscapes in New York City and in England, Mead artfully explores themes of identity, nationality, and inheritance. She recounts her time in the coastal town of Weymouth, where she grew up; her dizzying first years in New York where she broke into journalism; the rich process of establishing a new home for her dual-national son in London. Along the way, she gradually reckons with the complex legacy of her parents. Home/Land is a stirring inquiry into how to be present where we are, while never forgetting where we have been.

©2022 Rebecca Mead (P)2022 Random House Audio
Biographies & Memoirs New York England Heartfelt
activate_Holiday_promo_in_buybox_DT_T2

Critic reviews

A New Yorker Best Book of the Year

“A timely and powerful read . . . Clear and profound . . . Home/Land certainly has a memento mori quality, but it’s not depressing. In embracing the complexities and paradoxes of home and belonging, Mead also finds solace, even joy. She captures brilliantly the bittersweetness of being far from home. . . . Even for those who stay put, which is to say most of us for the last two years, Home/Land is a remarkable exploration of how being mindful of the past can enrich and imbue with urgency our everyday lives.”—Charles Arrowsmith, Los Angeles Times

“Exquisite detail . . . [With] many arresting images and diverting anecdotes . . . [Mead] has an exacting eye and a gift for trenchant phrasing.”—Becca Rothfeld, The New York Times

What listeners say about Home/Land

Average customer ratings
Overall
  • 4.5 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    3
  • 4 Stars
    3
  • 3 Stars
    0
  • 2 Stars
    0
  • 1 Stars
    0
Performance
  • 5 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    4
  • 4 Stars
    1
  • 3 Stars
    0
  • 2 Stars
    0
  • 1 Stars
    0
Story
  • 4.5 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    2
  • 4 Stars
    3
  • 3 Stars
    0
  • 2 Stars
    0
  • 1 Stars
    0

Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.

Sort by:
Filter by:
  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    4 out of 5 stars

Memoir by writer Rebecca Mead

I've read articles in The New Yorker by British author Mead and always enjoyed them, so I found this story of her family"s move from New York City to London to be informative and sometimes entertaining. There is more personal history here than I anticipated, but Ms Mead writes so well that it was easy to glide through that and focus on London, and its contrast with New York.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

Lyrical and moving

This is a splendid book!
Anyone who has left home for another country, or another part of your home country, will identify with Mead’s insights and yearning. I loved her book on “Middlemarch” and so tried this one - it is similarly profound and funny and thought-provoking.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!