'This house, my house, saw its beginnings at the marriage of my grandfather. Built to hold the family in its overflowing numbers, the house became a meeting place for grandparents, aunts, uncles, children and numerous cousins from surrounding villages, its rooms expanding around them like sunlight in winter.'
Nada Awar Jarrar's luminous book tells the stories of three women, each of them removed from home, returning home, searching for home, for somewhere that can be home. Each of them is Lebanese, each is unknown to the others, but each is drawn back to a country, to a village, to a house, that is - or was - or can be - home.
Maysa returns to live in the house that was her grandparents' when she was a child, in a village high on the slopes of Mount Lebanon, leaving Beirut and, at times, her husband and daughter, to search for her past and to imagine the past of her family in the home of her childhood.
Aida, who has long since left the country of her birth, returns to Lebanon in search of the spirit of Amou Mohammad, the Palestinian refugee who was a second father to her and her sisters when she was a child.
Salwa, now an old woman, taken by her husband from her family home, her homeland, and her family when she was a young wife and mother, recalls her life from her hospital bed, surround by her children and her grandson, but still, in some sense, far from home.
Every one of us needs somewhere to call home, a country, a place, a house. A physical location, but also a symbol of connections, of safety, of family, of identity. 'Somewhere, Home' explores the different meanings of home, in a world of emigration, of war, of economic migration and of return, of women who stay and men who leave, of women who leave and then return.
Subtle, touching and written in prose of great precision and grace, this is a remarkable debut, a profound and haunting work of fiction.
