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Start giftingInfinite Home
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Learn moreA beautifully wrought story of an ad hoc family and the crisis they must overcome together
Edith is a widowed landlady who rents apartments in her Brooklyn brownstone to an unlikely collection of humans, all deeply in need of shelter. Crippled in various ways—in spirit, in mind, in body, in heart—the renters struggle to navigate daily existence and soon come to realize that Edith’s deteriorating mind, and the menacing presence of her estranged, unscrupulous son, Owen, is the greatest challenge they must confront together.
Faced with eviction by Owen and his designs on the building, the tenants—Paulie, an unusually disabled man, and his burdened sister, Claudia; Edward, a misanthropic stand-up comic; Adeleine, a beautiful agoraphobe; Thomas, a young artist recovering from a stroke—must find in one another what the world has not yet offered or has taken from them: family, respite, security, worth, love.
The threat to their home scatters them far from where they’ve begun, to an ascetic commune in Northern California, the motel rooms of depressed middle America, and a stunning natural phenomenon in Tennessee, endangering their lives and their visions of themselves along the way.
With humanity, humor, grace, and striking prose, Kathleen Alcott portrays these unforgettable characters in their search for connection, for a life worth living, for home.
Born in 1988 in Northern California, Kathleen Alcott is the author of the novels Infinite Home and The Dangers of Proximal Alphabets. Her short stories and nonfiction have appeared in Zoetrope: All Story, ZYZZYVA, The Guardian, Tin House, The New York Times Magazine, the Bennington Review, and elsewhere. In 2017, she was shortlisted for the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award; her short fiction has been translated into Korean and Dutch. She divides her time between New York City, where she teaches fiction at Columbia University, and Vermont, where she serves as a 2018-2019 visiting professor at Bennington College.
The narrator of over 100 audiobooks, Christa Lewis has been nominated for an Audie Award and was a 2018 Listener's Choice finalist. She has been featured in AudioFile magazine and earned multiple Earphones Awards for recordings that have become Audible bestsellers in YA and literary fiction. Christa is a classically trained actress and graduate of Boston University's actor training program. She got her start as the voice of international television station DW-TV, and has been a regular on hundreds of cartoons, museum guides, documentaries, and commercials. Christa is bilingual-she speaks accent-free German fluently and can offer a variety of accents and dialects. An experienced teacher and director, Christa teaches commercial voice-over and audiobook narration.
Reviews
“If The Island of Misfit Toys were recast as a sleepy Brooklyn apartment building, it might look a bit like Alcott’s Infinite Home, where a collection of vividly drawn characters seem to breathe right out of the pages.”
“Wise, fresh…The joy of reading comes from how these seemingly insular people fall in love and help each other, melding lonely lives into an improvised family. Along the way, expect to find insights that make you stop, go back, and read again…You don’t know what’s coming in the last third of this book, and you will be astounded.”
“Don’t expect this novel to deliver trite messages about the redemptive power of makeshift families. Yet these damaged characters, in spite of themselves, provide one another with unexpected offerings of consolation and love.”
“Prepare to be moved, because this one will reach deep inside of you.”
“Alcott calls into question what ‘home’really means—is it a physical space populated by the belongings you acquire or a state of mind achieved when you’re surrounded with those you feel most at ease with? In Infinite Home, she posits that it’s somehow both.”
“At turns despondent and darkly funny, Alcott has woven a uniquely beautiful story which challenges the way we view the concept of home.”
“In her quietly wonderful second book, Alcott displays a deft hand with every one of her odd and startlingly real characters…The voices in this book speak volumes. A luminous second novel from a first-class storyteller.”
“The challenge presented by this novel for narrator Christa Lewis is portraying a small cast of highly diverse characters. Listeners will be enthralled by her consistent portrayals of these individuals, who seem to have little in common beyond living in the same Brooklyn brownstone…Lewis’ sensitive performance keeps listeners fully invested in this character-driven audiobook. Winner of the AudioFile Earphones Award.”
“A delectably subtle yet sublimely fierce study of many forms of bravery and loyalty.”
“This quirky little tale is sad, yet funny and ultimately redemptive. Christa Lewis expertly captures the voices of the characters.”
“Vibrant, inventive, expansive. Kathleen Alcott has peered through the walls of an everyday apartment building and transformed the private lives of its tenants into pure poetry. Infinite Home is as much a story of those neighbors we may only know in passing, as it is a commentary on the beauty and misfortune of our modern age.”
“Kathleen Alcott is part sculptor and part fire-breather—not only are these characters intricately carved but they stand up, walk right off the page, and beckon us into a story that is both vivid and welcoming.”
“Starting with the first page of Infinite Home, you will feel it: something different, something brave, and something fundamentally amazing about Kathleen Alcott’s power over the English language. Every yearning character in this breakout novel is flesh and blood. Alcott’s roving heart, and power as a storyteller, may very well be limitless.”
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