Women's Prize for Fiction 2023 Finalist

The 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 15 her life changes drastically and with tragic results.

"Croft moves quickly between powerful scenes that made me think about my own sisters. I love how the language displays a child's consciousness. A haunting accomplishment." Kali Fajardo-Anstine

About the Author

Jennifer Croft is the author of Homesick and Serpientes y escaleras and the co-winner with Nobel Laureate Olga Tokarczuk of The International Booker for the novel Flights . 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 Yorker, The New York Times , The New York Review Daily , The Paris Review Daily , The Los Angeles Review of Books , Granta , Tin House , BOMB , n+1 , Guernica , The Guardian , The Chicago Tribune and elsewhere. For Charco Press, she has translated Federico Falco's A Perfect Cemetery (2021) and Sylvia Molloy's Dismantling (forthcoming 2022).

Reviews

"Stunning and surprising." -New York Times

"A Boundary-Expanding Story Of Devotion And Growing Up" -NPR.org

"Poignant, creative, and unique" -Kirkus

"A tribute to the deep bond of sisterhood: how, over years navigating life, it stretches apart and snaps back." -The Scotsman

"HOMESICK is an incantatory and masterful work of art."" -Marisa Silver , author of MARY COIN and LITTLE NOTHING

"A poignant and moving meditation on family, friendship and place."" -Thomas Chatterton Williams , author of LOSING MY COOL

"A marvel: audacious and lyrical."" -Vu Tran , author of DRAGONFISH

"Change is life, and Homesick is an exercise in conscious, delicate, joyful change." -LA Review of Books

"[Croft] has created a memoir that is at once different from any other yet far more intimate." -Books and Bao

"Astonishing in its emotional reach, its evocation of a child's discovery and a young adult's suffering and all the wonder of words." -Shelf Awareness

"[A] marvel of a book that magically expresses the untranslatable." -Foreword Reviews

Book Information
ISBN 9781913867317
Author Jennifer Croft
Format Paperback
Page Count 219
Imprint Charco Press
Publisher Charco Press