Good Company

Kate Christensen is the author of nine previous novels, most recently Welcome Home, Stranger. Her fourth novel, The Great Man, won the 2008 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. She has also published two food-centric memoirs, Blue Plate Special and How to Cook a Moose, which won the 2016 Maine Literary Award for Memoir. Her essays, reviews, and short pieces have appeared in a wide variety of publications and anthologies. She lives with her husband and their two dogs in northern New Mexico.

"Our shelves could use more women like Rachel and Sam as a counterpoint to men in midlife who’ve dominated fiction for decades. . . . It’s exhilarating to read an uninhibited female character who is rife with contradictions. . . . Christensen also does a skillful job of animating difficult family relationships while avoiding a conventional arc of forgiveness. . . . In the end, it is surprising to see where Rachel meets herself.” — New York Times on Welcome Home, Stranger"A deeply endearing story about confronting one’s past and constructing a new future—under extreme duress. . . . Welcome Home, Stranger . . . arrives at the most lovely ending of a novel I’ve read all year." — Washington Post on Welcome Home, Stranger"Kate Christensen’s new novel, Welcome Home, Stranger, is a revelation, offering characters as real as your family and friends, a rich, vividly drawn setting, grab-you-by-the-throat drama and always, lurking in the shadows, a fierce authorial intelligence. What more could you ask?" — Richard Russo, author of Somebody’s Fool, on Welcome Home, Stranger"To the great literature of going home again we can now add Kate Christensen’s superb new novel Welcome Home, Stranger, a triumph of intelligence and wit (which will surprise none of her many fans). The prodigal here is a brilliant journalist grieving the loss of a very difficult mother while attempting peace with those she left behind: a resentful sister and an ex-lover who can be neither trusted nor forgotten. A spellbinding book from one of our best chroniclers of the very American struggle to strive for excellence while still living in community with others." — Ann Packer, author of The Children’s Crusade, on Welcome Home, Stranger"A fantastic study in loss—the grief kind and the yearning too, oh my god the yearning! Plus menopause. Plus Portland, Maine. I loved it." — Catherine Newman, author of We All Want Impossible Things, on Welcome Home, Stranger