This Place You Return to is Home

The elusive meaning of home is explored in these 11 spare stories. Throughout This Place You Return to is Home, bucolic settings contrast evocatively with the characters' sense of loss, deprivation, and yearning for safety. A woman flees her marriage and suburban life for the country house she grew up in, only to frighten her young daughters with her reclusive eccentricity. An obsessive London restaurant hostess returns to her dowdy childhood home, where her glamour is ridiculed by her dying aunt. While Gunn's lyrical writing sometimes feels a bit wispy, most of these melancholy tales impress the mind's eye like delicate watercolor paintings. B