The Road Home: A Novel - Softcover

"The Road Home is thematically rich, dealing with loss and separation, mourning and melancholia....As always, Tremain's writing has a delicious, crunchy precision."--Edward Marriott, The Observer (UK)

"Memorable. . .The journey through alienation toward self-respect and prosperity runs on a well-traveled road, but Tremain's vivid prose and attention to detail make this incarnation both convincing and pleasurable."--Susan Grimm, The Plain Dealer (Cleveland)

"This is a finely balanced novel of urgent humanity...The Road Home should keep you gripped...and fraught with anxious sympathy."--The Sunday Telegraph (UK)

"Rose Tremain brings the full tone and range of her novelist's imagination to bear on Lev, giving him, besides his enduring and endearing grief, humour, a romantic temperament, a genius for intimate male friendship and a poets' eye for
images."--Kate Clanchy, Times Literary Supplement (UK)

"At once a mystery story, a psychological exploration and a novel of ideas. That it should succeed and provoke on these various levels pays high tribute to Tremain's intellect."--Claire Messud (on "The Way I Found Her"), New York Times Book Review

"A magical novel...which offers great beauty, great ugliness, great wisdom."--Penelope Fitzgerald (on "Music and Silence"), The Spectator

"Wise, timely and emotionally satisfying, Rose Tremain's characters are immediately recognisable as is her London seen through the eyes of her Eastern European migrant."--Judges' citation, the 2008 Costa Book Awards

"This is a powerfully imagined story and a wonderful feat of emotional empathy, told with great warmth and humor."--Judges' citation, the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction

"Like Amy Bloom's recent novel, Away, or Ha Jin's A Free Life, Whitbread Award winner Tremain has written a worthy addition to the growing body of work centered on the loneliness and frustration of the immigrant experience."--Library Journal

"A sort of anti-Candide...Lev manages to be both a symbol of migrant workers and a fully developed character in his own right...an engaging, enjoyable, and informative read."--Booklist

In the wake of factory closings and his beloved wife's death, Lev makes his way from Eastern Europe to London, seeking work to support his mother and his little daughter. After a spell of homelessness, he finds a job in the kitchen of a posh restaurant and a room in the house of an appealing Irishman who has already lost his family. Never mind that Lev must sleep in a bunk bed surrounded by plastic toys--he has found a friend and shelter. However constricted his life in England remains, he compensates by daydreaming of home, by having an affair with a younger restaurant worker, and by trading gossip and ambitions via cell phone with his hilarious friend Rudi, who, dreaming of the wealthy West, lives largely for his battered Chevrolet.

Homesickness dogs Lev, not only for nostalgic reasons, but because he doesn't belong, body or soul, to his new country--but can he really go home again? Rose Tremain's prodigious talents as a prose writer are on full display in THE ROAD HOME, and her novel never loses sight of what is truly important in the lives we lead.