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Product Details
Washington Square Press, October 1999
Trade Paperback, 464 pages
ISBN-10: 0671778331
ISBN-13: 9780671778330
Description
The Road Home lies in the shadows of Manifest Destiny and Wounded Knee; it is etched into the landscape of an old man's memory and into the stubborn dreams of a young man's heart. In Jim Harrison's latest masterpiece, five members of the Northridge family narrate the tangled epic of their history on the expanses of the Nebraska plains. They strive to understand their fates, reconcile with demons of the past, love with honor, live in accordance with the land and the lessons in humility it teaches them. And to die with grace. As the family grapples with the mysterious forces that both pull them apart and draw them inextricably back together, they learn of life's lessons: the deception of passion, the pain of love, the vitality of art, and the supplication to nature's generosity and fury.
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Browse Inside The Road HomeThe New York Times Book Review
A graceful novel...To read this book is to feel the luminosity of nature in one's own being.
Boston Sunday Herald
The Road Home is Harrison at the peak of his powers, a splendid combined prequel and sequel...very much alive and probably his best novel.
Newsweek
Each Northridge family member stitches in a piece of the family history. They are such good company you forget they exist nowhere but in Harrison's imagination.
Denver Post
The Road Home confirms what his longtime fans already know: Harrison is on the short list of American literary masters.
Library Journal
Not only a compelling drama but a profound consideration of how one lives a meaningful life and faces death in an increasingly superficial, consumer-oriented culture.
San Diego Star-Tribune
Harrison gives us characters with heart and soul; keen-eyed and rarely sentimental, they are the sorts of people we'd like to be, and so our identification is immediate.
Newsday
The Road Home is a rapturous but unsentimental hymn of praise for the wonderous strangeness of life.
Boston Sunday Herald
The humor, conscience, and iconoclastic spirit of Mark Twain live on in Jim Harrison.
The (Memphis) Commercial Appeal
The Road Home is a bountiful, rambunctious, serious book about who we are and how we become that way, and its muscular, life-affirming story may open a few eyes and hearts.
New York Daily News
As you read Harrison, you sense that what he tells you about his characters is a fraction of what he knows. The reason they are so alive, so involving, is they reflect an enormous richness of experience
The New York Times Book ReviewThere is a singular comfort in knowing, on the first pages of a novel, that you are in the hands of a master.
The Washington PostIn his new novel, Jim Harrison demonstrates why he is considered one of the best storytellers around....Harrison is at the top of his game here. He aims high, pondering the meaning and the cost of American civilization through the story of a single family vividly rendered.
San Francisco ChronicleThe Road Home eventually wins our hearts and minds with its thoughtful meditation on the cyclical nature of life.
Publishers WeeklyReaders who let themselves be captured by the novel's breadth...will be rewarded by a deep and nourishing story.
NewsdayA slow, steady piecing together of a fascinating family album. The result is astonishingly rich and vivid and, ultimately, quite moving....The Road Home is a rapturous but unsentimental hymn of praise for the wondrous strangeness of life.
The Bloomsbury ReviewWhile writers such as Harrison pause to reflect, they do not retire. Their souls keep singing. Here's hoping for two or three decades more of Jim Harrison's poetry and prose.
The Washington TimesIf our most important writers are the ones who adamantly refuse to forget, then Jim Harrison ought to be considered a national treasure....His new novel The Road Home... is his longest, most ambitious, and most satisfying novel to date: rich in character, complex in theme, dazzling in scope....The cumulative effect is overwhelming. It is the world as seen through the eyes of the poet, a celebration of life's vast incomprehensibility, a "phenology" of the heart by a writer who clearly believes in the potential of the human.
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)The result here is a novel that's simply quicker than most, one that's wry and observant, and fully inhabiting its own heart.
The Wall Street JournalMr. Harrison is a first-rate nature writer, and the Midwestern prairies provide a broad canvas for his talents.
National PostHarrison's The Road Home is a grand and fabulous journey.
Anniston Star (TX)Jim Harrison's novel is a sweeping and generous portrayal of the individuality, the spirit, the union of a strong and complex family and the majesty of the Great Plains.
The SunThe Road Home is an exquisite marvel of storytelling. His novel becomes a hymn to the Native Americans no less than to the Nebraska sandhills.
Detroit Free PressHarrison's style, as always, contains lucid moments of quiet beauty.
BooklistThis novel-chronicle, laced with social criticism, will surely satisfy Harrison's legions of fans, make new admirers of first-time readers of his work, and ultimately take its place among the major works of American literature.
Forward magazineA wondrous tale larded with earthly humor and crafted with the painstaking attention to detail that is a Harrison hallmark.
Colette's ListTen years after publication of his epic novel Dalva, Jim Harrison continues the story of the Northridge family in The Road Home. It is a book well worth waiting a decade for.
Kirkus ReviewsA Vivid meditation on the defining power of the family, and the kind of redemption offered by an awareness of nature's rather pitiless beauty.
BookpageA spirited study of human nature, an epic bound by insight and love.
The Sunday OregonianI promise you will weep.
The Houston ChronicleThe Road Home showcases Harrison's powerful prose and spellbinding storytelling in a family saga that sweeps across decades and geographical borders.
Seattle TimesThe Road Home fearlessly confronts mortality and leaves the reader, as Harrison leaves his characters, temporarily at peace with the inevitability of everyone's collective fate.
