"A beautifully eloquent and provocative search for the meaning of home, the author revisits and comes to understand her complicated relationship with her childhood living in a social experiment. "
A fascinating, thoughtful, and insightful look into the very personal viewpoint of the author’s childhood growing up in an experimental community in the 1970’s and 80’s, and then her further search for the meaning of home. Susanna Crossman is much admired by the LoveReading team, she was the Judge’s Winner for our LoveReading Very Short Story Competition in 2019, with Oh, I Do Love a Banana.
We loved how much she was able to invest in such a short story, it made me so emotional, and even now I remember Stanley with fondness. She now lives in France and works as a writer, clinical arts therapist, and lecturer. In Home is Where We Start, her emotional eloquence and intelligence is felt from the start.
Susanna spent 15 years, from the age of six in the late 1970’s, in a shared mansion full of people attempting to bring their utopian dream to life. While visiting her childhood she is honest, yet kind and compassionate, both to herself and the others in the community. She visits emotional and dark times, she looks back and forwards, she examines and analyses using the skills she has learned.
This is an absolutely fascinating book, not only because she allows us to visit the social experiment, but for how very honest the author is, and how considerate and reflective she is. A LoveReading Star Book, Home is Where We Start is such a rewarding and generous read, highly recommended.
A Guardian book to look out for for 2024'A bold and intimate grappling with the hidden history at the heart of a childhood that was set up as a collectivist social experiment' EWAN MORRISON, author of How to Survive Everything'Strikingly good' NOREEN MASUD, author of A Flat PlaceIn the turbulent late seventies, six-year-old Susanna Crossman moved with her mother and siblings from a suburban terrace to a crumbling mansion deep in the English countryside. They would share their new home with over fifty other residents from all over the world, armed with worn paperbacks on ecology, Marx and radical feminism, drawn together by utopian dreams of remaking the world.
Home Is Where We Start features in the following genres: Biographies & Autobiographies, Liz Robinson's Picks of the Month, Recommendations, Star Books, Memoirs, Social groups: alternative lifestyles, Sociology and anthropology, Biography, Literature and Literary studies, Social groups, communities and identities, Society and culture: general, Society and Social Sciences
Paperback, Hardback. £9.89, down from the £10.99 cover price. In Stock.
Home Is Where We Start was written by Susanna Crossman and published by Fig Tree an imprint of Penguin Books Ltd
Home Is Where We Start has 320 pages
£9.89, reduced from £10.99. In Stock.
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