Call Me Home has an epic scope in the tradition of Louise Erdrich's The Plague of Doves or Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping and braids the stories of a family in three distinct voices: Amy, who leaves her Texas home at 19 to start a new life with a man she barely knows, and her two children, Jackson and Lydia, who are rocked by their parents' abusive relationship. When Amy is forced to bargain for the safety of one child over the other, she must retrace the steps in the life she has chosen. Jackson, 18 and made visible by his sexuality, leaves home and eventually finds work on a construction crew in the Idaho mountains, where he begins a potentially ruinous affair with Don, the married foreman of his crew. Lydia, his 12-year-old sister, returns with her mother to Texas, struggling to understand what she perceives to be her mother's selfishness. At its heart, this is a novel about family, our choices and how we come to live with them, what it means to be queer in the rural West, and the changing idea of home. Winner of the 2016 Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award
A National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Honoree
San Francisco Chronicle, A Best Book of 2015
"Megan Kruse is a young writer of raw and fearless talent and Call Me Home showcases all she can do. She writes here of harrowing lives-of a family bent and broken by violence, where each person is desperately trying to somehow grow toward light and liberation. In the process, she offers a most unlikely tale of hardness and hustle, of grace and loss, of painful love and tough breaks and the unimaginable paths we must all eventually take toward survival." -Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love
"Megan Kruse's first novel startles in its capacity for complexity . . . a blistering story of lightness and darkness, the power of family and the capacity we have to hurt those closest to us." -Rachel Hurn, San Francisco Chronicle
"What is home, and where is your life supposed to be, if where you are is a place of pain and fear? These are questions that arise in Call Me Home, Seattle author Megan Kruse"s impressively forceful debut novel." -Wingate Packard, The Seattle Times
"Kruse's quiet debut hints at a formidable literary power as she explores what it means to live with fear while also searching for some sense of home." -Jeanne Kolker, Wisconsin State Journal
"Call Me Home, packs quiet power . . . Kruse can craft a fine sentence." -Sara Rauch, Lambda Literary
"A powerful debut novel told with ferocity and grace." -Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Kruse's evocative, often lyrical language serves her subjects well, so that what results is not unleavened pain but painful beauty, even hope." -Julia Jenkis, Shelf Awareness
"Call Me Home is an uncommonly powerful debut novel. Megan Kruse writes with great heart and intelligence as she crafts a gripping story from the shards of a broken family." -Jess Walter, author of Beautiful Ruins
"I've been a big fan of Megan Kruse for a long time, but Call Me Home left me astonished by her talent. Beautifully written, deeply felt and utterly compelling, this story of a desperate family separated and on the run is full of unforgettable scenes and richly imagined characters and heady suspense. It's so vivid, it feels like my own memory. I recommend it with all my heart." -Dan Chaon, author of Await Your Reply
"Megan Kruse has written a tough, unflinching and very loving story about an isolated family trying to scrape by and find a way, one way or another, to survive. I was deeply moved by the lives of her characters and scared for them right up to the end. Just a wonderful book, in every way." -Beverly Lowry, author of Crossed Over: A Murder, A Memoir
"An urgent, beautiful book about love and its consequences, set against a backdrop of the unglamorized West. These characters will lodge themselves in your imagination, stick with you long after you"re done reading. A fine and o
