Women's Prize for Fiction Longlist
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Sign up todayHomesick
A Memoir
Length
4 hours 12 minutes
Language
English
Narrators
Jennifer Croft, Boris Dralyuk & Emily Sutton-Smith
This audiobook uses AI narration.
We’re taking steps to make sure AI narration is transparent.
Learn moreThe coming of age story of an award-winning translator, Homesick is about learning to love language in its many forms, healing through words, and the promises and perils of empathy and sisterhood.
Sisters Amy and Zoe grow up in Oklahoma where they are homeschooled for an unexpected reason: Zoe suffers from debilitating and mysterious seizures, spending her childhood in hospitals as she undergoes surgeries. Meanwhile, Amy flourishes intellectually, showing an innate ability to glean a world beyond the troubles in her home life, exploring that world through languages first. Amy’s first love appears in the form of her Russian tutor Sasha, but when she enters university at the age of fifteen her life changes drastically and with tragic results.
Jennifer Croft won the 2018 Man Booker International Prize for her translation from Polish of Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights. She has also received NEA, Cullman, PEN, Fulbright, and MacDowell fellowships and grants, as well as the inaugural Michael Henry Heim Prize for Translation, the 2018 Found in Translation Award, and a Tin House Scholarship for her memoir Homesick, originally written in Spanish. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literary Studies from Northwestern University and an MFA in Literary Translation from the University of Iowa. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Paris Review Daily, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Granta, BOMB, VICE, n+1 , Electric Literature , Tin House, Lit Hub, Guernica, the New Republic, The Guardian, the Chicago Tribune, and elsewhere. She lives in Los Angeles and Buenos Aires.
Jennifer Croft won the 2018 Man Booker International Prize for her translation from Polish of Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights. She has also received NEA, Cullman, PEN, Fulbright, and MacDowell fellowships and grants, as well as the inaugural Michael Henry Heim Prize for Translation, the 2018 Found in Translation Award, and a Tin House Scholarship for her memoir Homesick, originally written in Spanish. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literary Studies from Northwestern University and an MFA in Literary Translation from the University of Iowa. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Paris Review Daily, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Granta, BOMB, VICE, n+1 , Electric Literature , Tin House, Lit Hub, Guernica, the New Republic, The Guardian, the Chicago Tribune, and elsewhere. She lives in Los Angeles and Buenos Aires.
Emily Sutton-Smith has appeared in several films, including The Butterfly Effect 3 and Nevermore, as well as several television programs. As an audiobook narrator, she has read titles by Iris Johansen, Kendra Elliot, and Shéa MacLeod, among others, and won an AudioFile Earphones Award.
Reviews
“[A] marvel of a book that magically expresses the untranslatable…[of] the extent and limitations of love’s power.”
“Jennifer Croft writes each full-color scene of her powerful book with feeling, urgency, and exactitude.”
“This stunning memoir with photos is a love letter from one sister to another, a celebration of language and a story of devotion and disaster.”
“A heartbreaking, vanguard, and mixed-media coming-of-age memoir.”
“To live with homesickness is to live in the beautifully bruising space of separation created by the rapture of experience. Star translator Jennifer Croft occupies this space masterfully.”
“A visual love letter to family, language, and self-understanding…Every page of this stunning and surprising book turns words around and around.”
“Jennifer Croft has written a gorgeous and stunningly visceral memoir of heartbreak and love. The lapidary sentences and the disarming images are surfaces Croft invites her readers to see into, so that a single word or photograph shimmers with layers of resonance…make no mistake about it: Homesick is an incantatory and masterful work of art.”
“Jennifer Croft’s Homesick is a marvel: audacious and lyrical in its telling, deeply moving in its wisdom. It is a memoir not only on love and its mysterious permutations, but on the vitality of language and art, which enable us to translate who we are, where we’ve been, and why we are forever homesick for that which we cannot have.”
“Homesick, a poignant and moving meditation on family, friendship, place and the desire of the self to honor and transcend these and other ties, is a cause for celebration. It turns out one of our preeminent translators has an extraordinarily powerful story—and language—all her own.”
“Croft’s book explores the interplay between words and images and the complexity of sisterly bonds with intelligence, grace, and sensitivity. Poignant, creative, and unique.”
“A poignant and moving meditation…It turns out one of our preeminent translators has an extraordinarily powerful story―and language―all her own.”
“This inventive, stellar memoir examines the tensions between siblings and their separate fates in the most unsettling, unexpected ways. Jennifer Croft’s keen attention to the nuances and music of language is abundantly present in every sentence of Homesick.”
“A gorgeous and stunningly visceral memoir of heartbreak and love…Croft’s brilliant meditations on translation captivate the mind and the heart, for what is translation but a radical act of love and understanding? What a rare and thrilling thing it is to experience a cellular alteration occasioned by a work of art. And make no mistake about it: Homesick is an incantatory and masterful work of art.”
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