Homesick

by Jennifer Croft

Overview

Winner of the 2020 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing 

A Best Book of the Year at BuzzFeed and the Times Literary Supplement

"Croft writes with an extraordinary intensity that ensures this exceptional Bildungsroman will stay etched in the reader's mind for a very long time to come." Olga Tokarczuk, Nobel Prize-winning author of Flights

"It’s a complex portrait of a young Oklahoma woman’s development of a rich and exacting interior life. It’s also a visual love letter to family, language and self-understanding... Every page of this stunning and surprising book turns words around and around." —The New York Times 

"Croft's photos, mixed in with her text, create continuity between memoirist and protagonist, despite their differing names... They make Homesick into a translator's Bildungsroman, one in which art is first a beacon, then a home." —NPR

The coming of age story of an award-winning translator, Homesick is about learning to love language in its many forms, healing through words and the promises and perils of empathy and sisterhood.

Sisters Amy and Zoe grow up in Oklahoma where they are homeschooled for an unexpected reason: Zoe suffers from debilitating and mysterious seizures, spending her childhood in hospitals as she undergoes surgeries. Meanwhile, Amy flourishes intellectually, showing an innate ability to glean a world beyond the troubles in her home life, exploring that world through languages first. Amy’s first love appears in the form of her Russian tutor Sasha, but when she enters university at the age of 15 her life changes drastically and with tragic results.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781944700942
Publisher:	The Unnamed Press
Publication date:	09/10/2019
Pages:	256
Sales rank:	539,651
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 8.10(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Jennifer Croft was awarded the Man Booker International Prize in 2018 for her translation from Polish of Olga Tokarczuk’s FLIGHTS. She is the recipient of Fulbright, PEN, MacDowell, and National Endowment for the Arts grants and fellowships, as well as the inaugural Michael Henry Heim Prize for Translation and a Tin House Workshop Scholarship for her memoir HOMESICK. She holds a PhD from Northwestern Universityand an MFA from the Universityof Iowa. She is a founding editor of The Buenos Aires Review and has published her own work and numerous translations in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Review of Books, VICE, n+1, Electric Literature, Lit Hub, BOMB, Guernica, The New Republic, The Guardian, The Chicago Tribune, and elsewhere. Originally from Oklahoma, she currently divides her time between Buenos Aires and Los Angeles.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"This inventive, stellar memoir examines the tensions between siblings and their separate fates in the most unsettling, unexpected ways. Jennifer Croft's keen attention to the nuances and music of language is abundantly present in every sentence of Homesick." —Idra Novey, author of Those Who Knew

Editorial Reviews

"Haunting and visually poetic, Croft's book explores the interplay between words and images and the complexity of sisterly bonds with intelligence, grace, and sensitivity. Poignant, creative, and unique." —Kirkus Reviews

"In this marvel of a book that magically expresses the untranslatable, Croft follows Amy’s tortured path as she asks how far, and in what way, we are responsible for how loved ones’ lives play out. In her struggle to answer such questions, Amy learns the extent and limitations of love’s power." —Foreword Reviews

"Through photographs and prose, Croft's genre-blending memoir investigates how chronic illness sickens an entire family... A heartbreaking, vanguard, and mixed-media coming-of-age memoir." —Booklist

"This stunning memoir with photos is a love letter from one sister to another, a celebration of language and a story of devotion and disaster." —Shelf Awareness

From the Publisher

2019-06-09
A Man Booker International Prize-winning translator's photo-illustrated memoir about how growing up meant growing away from the younger sister she loved.

Changing "names, identifying details, and places," Croft tells the story of two sisters, Amy and Zoe, that draws on events from her own life. Elder sister Amy was in second grade when Zoe had the first of several seizures. Doctors concluded the episode stemmed from a mild concussion, but after another, more violent episode, scans revealed a tumor in Zoe's brain. The girls' parents home-schooled both girls, who developed a rivalry over Olympic ice skaters: Amy favored those from Russia and Zoe those from the Ukraine. When their father hired a Ukrainian-born tutor named Sasha to teach them the language of each girl's respective favorite country, the girls suddenly found themselves vying for his attention. But as Amy uncovered her linguistic gifts, she also found herself falling in love with Sasha, who later killed himself. She began college shortly afterward at age 15, where she indulged her passion for both languages and photography. In the meantime, Zoe, now homebound, was diagnosed with systemic lupus erythematosus. Consumed by guilt for the misfortunes of both her sister and Sasha, Amy fixated on and then attempted suicide. After she graduated at 18, she left Oklahoma for Berlin, hoping to leave behind her troubled home and become "a whole new person." Her travels, which she recorded in idiosyncratic photographs, took her all over Europe, where she experienced the epiphany at the heart of this book. Despite the apparent ease with which she moved between countries and languages, Amy's truest desire was to "fix forever the presence of her sister [and] never let her go" in every photo she shot. Haunting and visually poetic, Croft's book explores the interplay between words and images and the complexity of sisterly bonds with intelligence, grace, and sensitivity.

Poignant, creative, and unique.

Kirkus Reviews