Home

Toni Morrison sets the gold standard for a writer narrating her own work. Is there something higher than gold? Platinum? HOME is an elliptical book--so lyrically spare and carefully written it approaches poetry. For an audio version to succeed, it has to replace the security of the words keeping still on the page with something else that will hold the listener in the same way. Morrison's elegant, modulated, perfectly articulated performance does just that. It proceeds magisterially, giving every word exactly the weight it deserves and the time it needs to show the listener not only what has been said, but what is left unsaid. The story, of a damaged Korean war vet trying to get home, is at least in this telling, unforgettable. B.G. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2012, Portland, Maine

Starred review from March 26, 2012
In Pulitzer and Nobel Prize–winner Morrison’s immaculate new novel (after A Mercy), Frank Money returns from the horrors of the Korean War to an America that’s just as poor and just as racist as the country he fled. Frank’s only remaining connection to home is his troubled younger sister, Cee, “the first person ever took responsibility for,” but he doesn’t know where she is. In the opening pages of the book, he receives a letter from a friend of Cee’s stating, “Come fast. She be dead if you tarry.” Thus begins his quest to save his sister—and to find peace in a town he loathed as a child: Lotus, Ga., the “worst place in the world, worse than any battlefield.” Told in alternating third- and first-person narration, with Frank advising and, from time to time, correcting the person writing down his life story, the novel’s opening scene describes horses mating, “heir raised hooves crashing and striking, their manes tossing back from wild white eyes,” as one field over, the bodies of African-American men who were forced to fight to the death are buried: “...whatever you think and whatever you write down, know this: I really forgot about the burial. I only remembered the horses. They were so beautiful. So brutal.” Beautiful, brutal, as is Morrison’s perfect prose. Agent: Amanda Urban, ICM.