
Speak to Me of Home
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Almarie Guerra
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By:
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Jeanine Cummins
About this listen
What does it mean to call a place home?
From #1 New York Times bestselling author Jeanine Cummins comes a deeply felt multigenerational family story
On her wedding day in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in 1968, Rafaela Acuña y Daubón has mild misgivings, but she marries Peter Brennan Jr. anyway in a blaze of romantic optimism. She has no way of knowing how dramatically her life will change when she uproots her young family to start over in the American Midwest, unleashing a fleet of disappointments.
In the 1980s, against the backdrop of her mother’s isolation in St. Louis, Missouri, Rafaela’s daughter, Ruth, wants only to belong. Eager to fit in, Ruth lets go of her language, habits, and childhood memories of Puerto Rico. It’s not until decades later when Ruth’s own daughter, Daisy, returns to San Juan that her mother and grandmother begin to truly reflect on the choices that have come to define their lives.
When a hurricane ravages the island in 2023, leaving Daisy critically injured, Rafaela and Ruth return to the city where their story began. As they gather at Daisy’s bedside, we follow them back into the moments that brought them to this point: We watch as they come of age, fall in love, take risks, and contend with all the heartbreaks, triumphs, and reversals of fortune—both good and bad—that make up a meaningful life. As old memories come to light, so do buried secrets, leaving everyone in the family wondering exactly where it is that they belong.
A striking, resonant examination of marriage, family, and identity, Speak to Me of Home is ultimately a story of mothers and daughters that asks: How can three women who share geography and genetics have such wildly different ideas of where they come from? And, more important, can they discover a common language to find their way back home?
A Macmillan Audio production from Henry Holt & Company.
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Critic reviews
“A fine novel. . . . Daisy’s sections are the heart of the novel, dipping into magical realism as her spirit navigates the border between life and death and brings the family to her bedside with triumphant and transcendent love. This commendable return for Cummins comes with a surprise cherry-on-top twist.”
—Booklist
“Engrossing. . . . Cummins succeeds at breathing life into her large cast of characters and excels at depicting the nuances of a mother-daughter relationship.”
—Publishers Weekly
“[A] moving novel.”
—AARP, “Spring’s Top Reads”
“Jeanine Cummins’ Speak To Me Of Home is a masterful love letter to our shared homeland of Puerto Rico, the global diaspora, and every American. Once again, Cummins surveys the depths of the immigrant experience and compassionately examines the push and pull between our individual identity and our ancestral ties. Through three generations of Boricua women, the novel powerfully demonstrates that the greatest inheritance we can pass on is a courageous heart willing to adapt. Speak To Me Of Home is an epic must-read!”
—Sarah McCoy, New York Times, USA Today, and international bestselling author of Whatever Happened to Lori Lovely?
“Jeanine Cummins’ new novel is a beautiful, tender, complex story of origin, displacement, identity, and belonging. Poetically written and brimming with heart, Speak to Me of Home tells of a family’s yearning, through the generations, to find the roots that truly anchor them, the land that calls them home. A most moving and meaningful read.”
—Jennifer Rosner, award-winning author of Once We Were Home and The Yellow Bird Sings
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The Outside Boy
- By: Jeanine Cummins
- Narrated by: Alan Devally
- Length: 12 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Ireland, 1959: Young Christopher Hurley is a tinker, a Pavee gypsy, who roams with his father and extended family from town to town, carrying all their worldly possessions in their wagons. Christy carries with him a burden of guilt as well, haunted by the story of his mother’s death in childbirth. The wandering life is the only one Christy has ever known, but when his grandfather dies, everything changes. His father decides to settle briefly, in a town, where Christy and his cousin can receive proper schooling and prepare for their first communions.
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Pure Torture
- By Nena on 01-27-21
By: Jeanine Cummins
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Bug Hollow
- A Novel
- By: Michelle Huneven
- Narrated by: Emily Rankin
- Length: 7 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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When Sally Samuelson was eight years old, her golden boy brother Ellis went missing the summer he graduated high school. Ellis finally turned up at the bucolic Bug Hollow, a last gasp of the beautiful Northern California counterculture in the seventies. He had found joy in the communal life there, but died in a freak accident weeks later. From that point, the world of the Samuelsons never spins on the same axis, especially after Julia, Ellis’s girlfriend from Bug Hollow, shows up pregnant on their doorstep.
By: Michelle Huneven
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The Other Side of Now
- A Novel
- By: Paige Harbison
- Narrated by: Paige Harbison
- Length: 10 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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With a leading role on a hit TV show and a relationship with Hollywood’s latest heartthrob, Meg Bryan appears to have everything she ever wanted. But underneath, her happiness is as fake as her stage name, Lana Lord. Following a tiny nervous breakdown at her thirtieth birthday party, she books an impromptu trip to Ireland. Specifically, to the village where she and her best friend Aimee always dreamt of moving. When Meg arrives, the people in town don’t just recognize her, they seem to know her. She quickly—reluctantly—realizes she has somehow slipped into an alternate reality.
By: Paige Harbison
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This Is Your Mother
- A Memoir
- By: Erika J. Simpson
- Narrated by: Ericka J. Simpson
- Length: 5 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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When Erika Simpson was growing up, her mother loomed large, almost biblical in her life. A daughter of sharecroppers, middle child of ten, her origin story served as a Genesis. Her departure from home and a cheating husband, pursuing higher education along the way a kind of Exodus. Her rules for survival, often repeated like the Ten Commandments, guided Erika’s own journey into adulthood. And the most important rule? Throughout her life, Sallie Carol preached the power of a testimony—which often proved useful in talking her way out of a bind with bill collectors.
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Wow!
- By Anna Hargrave on 05-15-25
By: Erika J. Simpson
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Typewriter Beach
- A Novel
- By: Meg Waite Clayton
- Narrated by: Gilli Messer
- Length: 9 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Set in Carmel-by-the-Sea and in 1950s Hollywood—in the days of the studio system and McCarthy-era scaremongering about an America “riddled with communists and homosexuals”—Typewriter Beach is the unforgettable story of an unlikely friendship between an Oscar-nominated screenwriter and a young actress hoping to be Alfred Hitchcock's new star.
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These Heathens
- A Novel
- By: Mia McKenzie
- Narrated by: Bahni Turpin
- Length: 7 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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Where do you get an abortion in 1960 Georgia, especially if your small town’s midwife goes to the same church as your parents? For seventeen-year-old Doris Steele, the answer is Atlanta, where her favorite teacher, Mrs. Lucas, calls upon her brash, wealthy childhood best friend, Sylvia, for help. While waiting to hear from the doctor who has agreed to do the procedure, Doris spends the weekend scandalized by, but drawn to, the people who move in and out of Sylvia’s orbit.
By: Mia McKenzie
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The Red House
- By: Mary Morris
- Narrated by: Alyssa Bresnahan
- Length: 10 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Thirty years ago, Laura’s mother, Viola, went missing. She left behind her purse, her keys and her mysterious paintings of a red house. Viola was never found, and her family never recovered. Laura, an artist herself, held on to the paintings. On the back of each work, her mother scrawled in Italian, “I will not be here forever.” The family never understood what Viola meant.
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Beautiful story, couldn’t stop listening
- By A on 05-20-25
By: Mary Morris
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What Kind of Paradise
- A Novel
- By: Janelle Brown
- Narrated by: Peter Ganim, Helen Laser
- Length: 11 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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Growing up in an isolated cabin in Montana in the mid-1990s, Jane knows only the world that she and her father live in: the woodstove that heats their home, the vegetable garden where they try to eke out a subsistence, the books of nineteenth-century philosophy that her father gives her to read in lieu of going to school. Her father is elusive about their pasts, giving Jane little beyond the facts that they once lived in the Bay Area and that her mother died in a car accident, the crash propelling him to move Jane off the grid to raise her in a Waldenesque utopia.
By: Janelle Brown
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Shopgirls
- A Novel
- By: Jessica Anya Blau
- Narrated by: Caitlin Kinnunen
- Length: 9 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Nineteen-year-old Zippy can hardly believe it: she’s the newest and youngest salesgirl at I. Magnin, “San Francisco’s Finest Department Store.” Every week, she rotates her three spruced-up Salvation Army outfits and Vaseline-shined pumps; still, she’s thrilled to walk those pumps through the employee entrance five days a week as she saves to buy something new.
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So good!
- By CCGOOD on 05-10-25
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The Phoenix Pencil Company
- A Novel
- By: Allison King
- Narrated by: Carolyn Kang, Jodi Long, Sura Siu, and others
- Length: 13 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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Monica Tsai spends most days on her computer, journaling the details of her ordinary life and coding for a program that seeks to connect strangers online. A self-proclaimed recluse, she's always struggled to make friends and, as a college freshman, finds herself escaping into a digital world, counting the days until she can return home to her beloved grandparents. They are now in their nineties, and Monica worries about them constantly—especially her grandmother, Yun, who survived two wars in China before coming to the States, and whose memory has begun to fade.
By: Allison King
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Everything We Thought Was True
- A Novel
- By: Lisa Montanaro
- Narrated by: Annalee Scott
- Length: 10 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Los Angeles lawyer Lena Antinori has dedicated her career to fighting discrimination, including for the LGBTQ community, but her own family's secret haunts her. At thirteen years old, she made the startling discovery that her father, Frank, was gay and her mother, Teresa, knew. Fearing social stigma, Teresa instituted a code of silence meant to protect their Italian Catholic family—a code Lena adhered to for decades. Now, Frank plans to marry his partner, and he wants Lena to help plan the wedding.
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Emotional, Heartwarming, and Deeply Personal
- By Amanda Speights on 05-29-25
By: Lisa Montanaro
Almarie Guerra's narration on the audio version is absolute perfection. Her vocal timbre -- sweet, clear, and imbued with a deep knowledge of Borikén -- is mesmerizing. The pronunciation choices she makes of English-accented vs. Spanish-accented vs. actual Spanish is true to character every time. Her ability to embody each character through nuanced inflection and palpable connection draws the listener even closer to the emotional core of the story.
This novel illuminates the profound value of trust, family, and honesty. While the heartbreaks and pain depicted are devastating, they ultimately give way to a splendor as breathtaking as the most beautiful island beach sunset.
I highly recommend this book, and particularly, the audio-version.
Finding Home Across Cultures and Generations
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Multi Generational Epic Novel
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Disappointing
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Hard to follow
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