Belonging: Home Away from Home

(Paperback)

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Isabel Huggan's acclaimed Belonging is pure pleasure to read-richly entertaining, beautifully written, laced with gentle humour and valuable insights acquired during years of world travel. Beginning as a memoir and concluding with three short stories, Belonging illuminates the mysterious manner in which chance and choice together shape our lives. At the book's core is Isabel Huggan's stone house set among vineyards in the foothills of the Cevennes mountains in the south of France, from where she contemplates the meaning of home and the importance of remembrance.

Reviews

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

From the richness of her experiences Huggan has fashioned a memoir of singular beauty. London Free Press

Fans of the calm, elegant intelligence of Alice Munro or Carol Shields will feel right at home. Vancouver Sun

Huggans story of her midlife move to France is what Peter Mayles Provence should have been. An outstanding writer who speaks from the heart with great intelligence, Huggan . . . explores what it is to be in a new country, and what draws us to our old ones. Globe and Mail

Isabel Huggan takes the reader around the world, from France to Canada to Kenya to the Philippines to Australia and back again. . . . Her descriptions of the mountains, forests, and sea in Tasmania are lyrical and lucid, as are all her evocations of landscapes. . . . A remarkably strong and subtle voice. Toronto Star

Huggan writes with a gentle thoughtfulness and her phrases are suffused with beauty. . . . Her style is warm and confiding, like a friend asking you in for tea on a dreary day. She explores her own heart and mind with a deft touch and in the process answers some big questions about who we are and how we became who we are. . . . Belonging shows us that home is always with us. Hamilton Spectator

This is a book youll have to give away and buy another and anotheruntil finally you can keep one for yourself to read again in the small hours our lives are made of. Lorna Crozier, author of After That and Through the Garden

A book about the yearning to belong, family ties, unexpected friendships, and how life usually turns out to be quite different from our plans. . . . [Belonging is] a pleasure to read and provides an intimate look at a fascinating and open-minded woman. Toronto Sun

"The book is part engaging memoir and part intriguing exploration of how the creative mind works. Winnipeg Free Press

Summer reading, I believe, should either draw you forcefully out of your world, or draw you irresistibly further into it. Belonging may do both. . . . This is not so much a book to read, as to re-read. Huggans stories [are] graced with turns of phrase and pockets of language that, well, make you turn down the page to go back. The Observer

The best part of this book is her candid and engaging voice. By the time you turn the page on the last memoir in the collection, you feel welcomed as a friend, made privy to confidences, epiphanic insights, and intimate memories. Ottawa Citizen

Belonging is an elegant, gracefully written reminiscence of what it means to leave your home and native land. . . . Its an entrancing journey. The Sun Times

Author Bio

ISABEL HUGGAN was born in Kitchener, Ontario, in 1943. In the decade following her BA, she worked as a copy editor, teacher, and newspaper reporter. Besides writing short stories, essays, and reviews, over the years she ledcreative writing workshops in Canada, Switzerland, France, Australia, and the Philippines. Leaving Ottawa in1987, shelived with her husband in Kenya andthe Philippinesand finally in France, where their restoration of an old stone house led to her final book Belonging. After the death of her husband in 2011, she opened a Writer's Retreat in her stone barn forindividuals looking fora quiet place to write.For twenty years wasa mentor for the Humber School for Writers correspondence program, and she has continued to work privately as a manuscript consultant. In 2020 she returned to Canada, and now lives in Orillia, Ontario.