Welcome Home, Lucia Berlin
Welcome Home, Lucia Berlin
List: $16.95 | Sale: $11.87
Club: $8.47

Welcome Home

Author: Lucia Berlin, Jeff Berlin

Narrator: Hillary Huber

Unabridged: 4 hr 14 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 11/06/2018

Synopsis

Before Lucia Berlin died, she was working on a book of previously unpublished autobiographical sketches called Welcome Home. The work consisted of more than twenty chapters that started in 1936 in Alaska and ended (prematurely) in 1966 in southern Mexico. In our publication of Welcome Home, her son, Jeff Berlin, is filling in the gaps with photos and letters from her eventful, romantic, and tragic life.From Alaska to Albuquerque, Kentucky to Mexico, New York City to Chile, Berlin’s world was wide. And the writing here is, as we’ve come to expect, dazzling. She describes the places she lived and the people she knew with all the style and wit and heart and humor that readers fell in love with in her stories. Welcome Home is an essential nonfiction companion to A Manual for Cleaning Women and Evening in Paradise.

About Lucia Berlin

Lucia Berlin (1936–2004) worked brilliantly but sporadically throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Her stories are inspired by her early childhood in various western mining towns; her glamorous teenage years in Santiago, Chile; three failed marriages; a long-term problem with alcoholism; her years spent in Berkeley, New Mexico, and Mexico City; and the various jobs she later held to support her writing and her four sons. Sober and writing steadily by the 1990s, she took a visiting writer’s post at the University of Colorado Boulder in 1994 and was soon promoted to associate professor. In 2001, in failing health, she moved to Southern California to be near her sons. She died in 2004 in Marina del Rey. Her first posthumous collection, A Manual for Cleaning Women, was named one of the New York Times Book Review’s Ten Best Books of 2015.

About Hillary Huber

Hillary Huber is a multiple Audie Award finalist, an Earphones Award winner, and an AudioFile Best Voice. She has recorded over three hundred titles spanning many genres and holds a bachelor's degree in English literature. A voracious reader and listener, she was raised in Connecticut and Hawaii but now splits her time between California and New York.

Reviews

Goodreads review by emma

Once upon a time, I found myself in an airport without any reading material at all, and also in a terminal that contained an outpost of one of my then-favorite bookstores. This is a situation that has only one remedy: Buying more books than necessary at a far higher price than necessary. One of the bo......more

Goodreads review by Jon

This was such a wonderful examination of a life that ebbed with vitality and creative curiosity. Lucia Berlin marches to the beat of her own drum and never tries to blame where the marching takes her on anyone. It is so rare to find such honesty and stoic acceptance of both the good and the bad; to......more

Goodreads review by Juan

Empecé “Manual para mujeres de la limpieza” y me estaba gustando TANTO que decidí pararlo y ponerme con “Bienvenida a casa” para saber más sobre la vida real de Lucia Berlin y comprobar cuánto de lo que hay en sus relatos corresponde a verdaderamente a su biografía. El libro no es que sea malo: es q......more

Goodreads review by Come

Welcome home di Lucia Berlin è uscito il 7 novembre per Bollati Boringhieri. Sono i suoi scritti ritrovati dai figli dopo la sua morte. Se non l’avete mai letta, questo potrebbe essere un ottimo inizio per farlo. Tre matrimoni alle spalle, quattro figli, una famiglia di provenienza in cui madre e no......more

Quotes

“Berlin doesn’t fuss with preamble or elaborate scene setting in her nonfiction; instead, she quietly homes in on elliptical, freighted moments…Berlin’s nonfiction makes apparent her genius for taking personal, idiosyncratic scenes from her memory and crafting them into fiction that speaks to us all.” Washington Post

“Gives a sense of the joyousness of [Berlin’s] personality, which is as urgently expressed in all her writing as loneliness and desperation are. Her writing loves the world, lingers over details of touch and smell.” Atlantic

“If you’ve come this far in the Berlin oeuvre, resistance is futile…Welcome Home comprises Berlin’s fragmentary, unfinished memoirs, bringing into focus a writer whose life was as wild and tragic as her fiction.” Vulture

“Tantalizing glimpses into the life of a recently discovered writer…An excellent start to understanding a writer and her work.” Kirkus Reviews

Awards

  • Indie Next List
  • Vulture.com Pick
  • BuzzFeed Books Pick
  • Newsday Pick
  • Huffington Post Pick
  • Paris Review Selection
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