There is a particular phone call that changes things. A parent has fallen, or forgotten something they should not have forgotten, and the adult child on the other end of the line starts doing math they never wanted to do: how far away they live, how much time they have, how much longer this can go on the way it has been going.
These four novels sit inside that math. Below them is a newer one, The Pull, which closes out a trilogy that began with a different kind of loss.
Four Novels About Coming Home
Crow
A Cape Breton novel about a woman who returns home after a devastating diagnosis, and finds her estranged, eccentric family waiting exactly where she left them. Funny, sharp, and rooted in the same coastline as the Rise Again series.
We Are Not Ourselves
A sweeping, patient novel that follows a family across decades, and settles into its hardest chapters when a husband's decline asks his wife to become someone she never planned on being. Unsparing about what caregiving actually costs.
A Thousand Acres
An aging father divides his farm among his three daughters, and old wounds resurface as the family works out what they owe him, and each other. A Pulitzer-winning reckoning with land, inheritance, and the debts that come with home.
The Corrections
Adult siblings, scattered across the country, are called home for one last Christmas as their father's health fails and their mother tries to hold the family together by sheer will. Sprawling and darkly funny about the gravity a parent's decline exerts.
Where The Pull Fits
Some years after a young welder left for Churchill, Frank Murray is older and slower, still in the house in Glace Bay. His daughter Ann lives in Toronto. One day the phone rings. Frank has fallen in the garden. He is mostly alright.
But something shifts in Ann that night, and over the year that follows she is pulled, by her father's decline, by the old house's quiet accumulation, by the gravity of the island itself, toward a decision she never thought she'd make. The Pull is a novel about coming home late, and about the particular weight of a place that has been waiting for you. It closes the series where it began: with three words typed into a laptop in a yellow kitchen, said this time by someone who now understands why they are said the way they are.
