The Home Corner

(Paperback, Main)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

Nineteen-year-old Luisa McKenzie has failed her Scottish Highers and finds herself back at primary school - working as a teaching assistant, a role she never envisaged or wanted. Her old friends have all left town and she spends her days perched in the classroom's Home Corner, answering questions about God and Death and the colour of the sky.

Increasingly disillusioned and reflecting on paths not taken, Luisa begins to ask her own questions about life and the so-called adult world. As her end-of-year review looms, it looks like she may not even be able to hold down this unsatisfactory job much longer and, with the discovery of an uncomfortable secret, her take on reality slowly begins to unravel . . .

The Home Corner explores the way we create our own identities in the light of other people's, and queries the distinctions that are made between the absent and the present, the real and the imagined.

Reviews

Ruth Thomas is a brilliant chronicler and observer of the hum-drumness of everyday life and this is a wonderfully funny and poignant story about how unsettling the transition from childhood to adulthood can be. -- Carla McKay Daily Mail Thomas writes Luisa's story with a deft touch and a subtle lyricism ... [her] portrayal of the struggles and anxieties of late-adolescence are truly excellent and the empathy with which the story is treated create a warm, engrossing novel. -- Daniel Davies The Skinny This is no teenage coming-of-age novel but a reckoning of the space each of us occupies in the adult world ... The Home Corner has the layered feel and texture of a short story but the impetus of an intriguing novel. There's a self-deprecating humour and a subtle sadness in what passes for ordinary life. As a philosophical meditation on the paths not taken, it excels. Sunday Business Post

Author Bio

Ruth Thomas is a novelist and short-story writer. Her first story collection was shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys and the Saltire Society First Book Awards, and her second received a Scottish Arts Council Book Award. Her first novel Things to Make and Mend received a Good Housekeeping Book Award. The Home Corner is her second novel. Ruth was born in Kent and now lives in Edinburgh with her husband and three children. She is currently a Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellow at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, Glasgow..