Home

Reading like an oral history dialogue between a writer and a Korean veteran, this slim novel by Nobel Prize-winning Toni Morrison meditates on home and what that means to us. What does 'home' mean when your experience of it as a child has been dirt-poor harsh, sharing a shack and sleeping on floors?

Frank's first memories include hiding in long grass, chilled by fear, watching a party of men bury a body. Beside him, four years younger, is his little sister Cee - the only person he's ever loved, and whom he vows to protect, come what may.

Now she's an adult - or close to it - and in danger. Frank, bruised by witnessing the deaths of his two childhood friends in Korea, forces himself out of the alcoholic haze and out of the trauma of nightmares, to trek home. Hindered and helped in equal measure, he arrives, but can he save her? And can he confront the cause of his other nightmares?

Morrison may be known for writing about the plight and humanity of USA's southern blacks, but this story doesn't go banging drums or waving placards about civil rights abuse. Instead, this novel talks with dignity and poetry about the cast-aside and powerless, and about how our understanding of home can bring the best, and perhaps only, healing.