The Year We Left Home

A New York Times bestseller, The Year We Left Home is National Book Award finalist Jean Thompson's mesmerizing, decades-spanning saga of one ordinary American family that captures the turbulent history of the country at large.

Named a New York Times Editors' Choice, a People magazine "Pick of the Week," and an Indie Next and Midwest Connections selection, The Year We Left Home is the career-defining novel that Jean Thompson's admirers have been waiting for: a sweeping and emotionally powerful story of a single American family during the tumultuous final decades of the twentieth century.

Stretching from the early 1970s in the Iowa farmlands to suburban Chicago and across the map of contemporary America, The Year We Left Home follows the Erickson siblings as they confront prosperity and heartbreak, setbacks and triumphs, and seek their place in a country whose only constant seems to be breathtaking change. Ambitious and richly told, this is a vivid and moving meditation on our continual pursuit of happiness and an incisive exploration of the national character.

Author: Jean Thompson
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 02/07/2012
Pages: 352
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.65lbs
Size: 8.40h x 5.50w x 0.90d
ISBN: 9781439175903

Review Citation(s):
New York Times Book Review 03/04/2012 pg. 24
Entertainment Weekly 06/29/2012 pg. 77
Christian Century 12/12/2012 pg. 23

About the Author
Jean Thompson is a novelist and short story writer. Her works include the novels A Cloud in the Shape of a Girl, She Poured Out Her Heart, The Humanity Project, The Year We Left Home, City Boy, Wide Blue Yonder, The Woman Driver, and My Wisdom and the short story collections The Witch and Other Tales Re-Told, Do Not Deny Me, Throw Like a Girl, Who Do You Love (a National Book Award finalist), Little Face and Other Stories, and The Gasoline Wars. Thompson's short fiction has been published in many magazines and journals, including the New Yorker, and anthologized in The Best American Short Stories and The Pushcart Prize. Thompson has been the recipient of Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, among other accolades, and has taught creative writing at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Reed College, Northwestern University, and other colleges and universities. She lives in Urbana, Illinois.

This title is not returnable