A New York Times Notable Book
"Haunting, disturbing, often radiantly intense, these protean stories change shape as if they are made of fire. They are on the side of things lost, they are pushed by the emergency of our lives--yet in the dazzle of their language there is a wonderful stillness, and consolation." — Andrea Barrett In this stunningly original collection, A. M. Homes writes with terrifying compassion about the things that matter most. Homes's distinctive narrative illuminates our dreams and desires, our memories and losses, and demonstrates how extraordinary the ordinary can be. With uncanny emotional accuracy, wit, and empathy, Homes takes us places we recognize but would rather not go alone.

Things You Should Know: A Collection of Stories

Literature & Fiction

Homes, A.M.

United States

Harper-perennial

Published to overwhelming critical acclaim, this extraordinary collection of short stories established A. M. Homes as one of the most provocative and daring writers of her generation. Here you'll find the cult classic "A Real Doll," the tale of a teenage boy's erotic obsession with his sister's favorite doll; "Adults Alone," which first introduced Paul and Elaine, the crack-smoking yuppie couple whose marriage careens out of control in Homes's novel Music for Torching; and "Looking for Johnny," in which a kidnapped boy, having failed his abductor's expectations, is returned home.
Brilliantly conceived, sharply etched, and exceptionally satisfying, these stories explore the American dream in ways you're not likely soon to forget. Working in Kodacolor hues, Homes offers an uncanny picture of a surreal suburbia-outrageous and utterly believable.

Safety of Objects

Short Stories & Anthologies

Perennial

Since her debut in 1989, A. M. Homes has been among the boldest and most original voices of her generation, acclaimed for the psychological accuracy and unnerving emotional intensity of her storytelling. Her ability to explore how extraordinary the ordinary can be is at the heart of her touching and funny new novel, her first in six years. This Book Will Save Your Life is a vivid, uplifting, and revealing story about compassion, transformation, and what can happen if you are willing to lose yourself and open up to the world around you.

This Book Will Save Your Life: A Novel

Humor & Entertainment

Humor

Penguin Publishing Group

Disconnected from the outside world until a health scare and a sink hole in his yard force him to forge new relationships, middle-aged everyman Richard Novak finds his life changed by a doughnut shop owner, a kidnapped woman, a counterculture icon, and others. Simultaneous.

This Book Will Save Your Life

Penguin Audio

The "fierce and eloquent" (New York Times) memoir by the award-winning author of May We Be Forgiven and This Book Will Save Your Life The acclaimed writer A. M. Homes was given up for adoption before she was born. Her biological mother was a twenty-two-year-old single woman who was having an affair with a much older married man with a family of his own. The Mistress's Daughter is the ruthlessly honest account of what happened when, thirty years later, her birth parents came looking for her. Homes relates how they initially made contact and what happened afterwards, and digs through the family history of both sets of her parents in a twenty-first-century electronic search for self. Daring, heartbreaking, and startlingly funny, Homes's memoir is a brave and profoundly moving consideration of identity and family. "A compelling, devastating, and furiously good book written with an honesty few of us would risk." —Zadie Smith "I fell in love with it from the first page and read compulsively to the end." —Amy Tan

The Mistress's Daughter: A Memoir

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

The breakthrough story collection that established A. M. Homes as one of the most daring writers of her generationOriginally published in 1990 to wide critical acclaim, this extraordinary first collection of stories by A. M. Homes confronts the real and the surreal on even terms to create a disturbing and sometimes hilarious vision of the American dream. Included here are "Adults Alone," in which a couple drops their kids off at Grandma's and gives themselves over to ten days of Nintendo, porn videos, and crack; "A Real Doll," in which a girl's blond Barbie doll seduces her teenaged brother; and "Looking for Johnny," in which a kidnapped boy, having failed to meet his abductor's expectations, is returned home. These stories, by turns satirical, perverse, unsettling, and utterly believable, expose the dangers of ordinary life even as their characters stay hidden behind the disguises they have so carefully created.

The Safety of Objects: Stories

“With dark humor and sharp dialogue, Homes plumbs the depths of everyday American anxieties.” —Time A razor-sharp story collection from a writer who is always "furiously good" (Zadie Smith, bestselling author of Swing Time). With her signature humor and compassion, A.M. Homes exposes the heart of an uneasy America in her new collection - exploring our attachments to each other through characters who aren't quite who they hoped to become, though there is no one else they can be. In "A Prize for Every Player," a man is nominated to run for president by the customers of a big box store, while he and his family do their weekly shopping. At a conference on genocide(s) in the title story, old friends rediscover themselves and one another - finding spiritual and physical comfort in ancient traditions. And in "Hello Everybody" and "She Got Away," Homes revisits a Los Angeles family obsessed with the surfaces and frightened of what lives below. In the nearly three decades since her seminal debut collection The Safety of Objects, Homes has been celebrated by readers and critics alike as one of our boldest and most original writers, acclaimed for her psychological accuracy and "satire so close to the truth it's terrifying" (Ali Smith). Her first book since the Women's Prize-winning May We Be Forgiven, Days of Awe is a major new addition to her body of visionary, fearless, outrageously funny work.

Days of Awe: Stories

Humor & Satire

Penguin??Books

A woman who was adopted as a newborn recounts her experience of meeting her birth parents, describing how adoption affected her sense of identity, her efforts to learn about her late birth mother's personal life, and her discouragement with her birth father's unwillingness to invite her into his family. Simultaneous.

The Mistress's Daughter

Winner of the 2013 Women's Prize for Fiction—A darkly comic novel of twenty-first-century domestic life by a writer who is always “compelling, devastating, and furiously good” (Zadie Smith) Harold Silver has spent a lifetime watching his younger brother, George, a taller, smarter, and more successful high-flying TV executive, acquire a covetable wife, two kids, and a beautiful home in the suburbs of New York City. But Harry, a historian and Nixon scholar, also knows George has a murderous temper, and when George loses control the result is an act of violence so shocking that both brothers are hurled into entirely new lives in which they both must seek absolution. Harry finds himself suddenly playing parent to his brother’s two adolescent children, tumbling down the rabbit hole of Internet sex, dealing with aging parents who move through time like travelers on a fantastic voyage. As Harry builds a twenty-first-century family created by choice rather than biology, we become all the more aware of the ways in which our history, both personal and political, can become our destiny and either compel us to repeat our errors or be the catalyst for change. May We Be Forgiven is an unnerving, funny tale of unexpected intimacies and of how one deeply fractured family might begin to put itself back together.

May We Be Forgiven: A Novel

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Homes, A.M.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Homes, A.M.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Homes, A.M.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Things You Should Know: A Collection of Stories

Safety of Objects

This Book Will Save Your Life: A Novel

This Book Will Save Your Life

The Mistress's Daughter: A Memoir

The Safety of Objects: Stories

Days of Awe: Stories

The Mistress's Daughter

This Book Will Save Your Life

May We Be Forgiven: A Novel