This is a book set between Kenya and England. It is a story of 2 girls who meet at University and are close friends. They both fall for Lewis who is not a very likeable character. Emma has a baby by Lewis named Kiama,who eventually wants to return to Kenya to visit the places his mother loved.
I found the writing of this book difficult too read and not very engaging. I did make it to the end, but found it to be a chore and not really a book I'd recommend to read.
Thanks to Netgalley for an A.R.C.

Homecoming tells the story of Yvonne, Emma, Lewis and Kiama. Yvonne and Emma are best friends and housemates. Emma meets someone she really likes, and to Yvonne's horror, it's a man she recently had a one night stand with, a man she hoped would call her, but never did. Meet Lewis. A man who is to become the source of guilt and confusion for Yvonne for many years to come. Lewis meant to call her, but lost her number. There is still an undeniable attraction, but he's off-limits. However, Lewis isn't in to Emma and ends it. But their story doesn't end there as Emma discovers she is pregnant.

Finding it hard being a single parent, Emma returns to Kenya where her family still live, and Yvonne and Lewis find themselves drawn together again. Yvonne feels guilty at keeping this secret from her best friend, and when she goes to visit Emma and her son Kiama, she tells Emma about her and Lewis being together. Emma runs off and tragically, this is to be the last time Yvonne sees her alive.

Kiama is now 18, and reaches out to Yvonne as he is returning to Kenya to try to process his grief at losing his mother in such awful circumstances. Yvonne makes the decision to go with him and as they spend time together, tensions rise as each tries to deal with the emotion of the visit. When Kiama figures out that his father and Yvonne were involved he is hurt and angry and Yvonne feels she has lost her last connection to her best friend.

As Kiama reaches a place of peace, he is able to forgive and show compassion to his father, and the ending of this novel is beautifully understated and perfectly pitched.

Homecoming is moving and intimate in its portrayal of forbidden love, grief and forgiveness.

I absolutely ADORED Nightingale Point so had high hopes for this one...and I wasn't disappointed! It's a very different book (with less of an immediate hook) but Goldie's clever observation of the complexity of human nature is in evidence through-out and it's laced with moral dilemmas for the characters and the reader alike. A good choice for a book group, it's accessible for a wide audience but with enough depth for some discussions.

Homecoming follows the journey of Kiama, a young man seeking to find answers by returning to Kenya, where he tragically witnessed his Mother die as a young boy and Yvonne his Mother's best friend, whom he asks to accompany him on his travels.

This journey to Kenya, evokes many buried feelings for Yvonne and unravels hidden secrets, left in the past long a go. These secrets belong to Yvonne and Kiama's Father Lewis, and have been left untold for at least a decade. So whilst facing his own personal demons, Kiama also wakes up those of Yvonne's and the guilt she has always felt comes flooding back.

Firstly, I need to say Goldie is a blooming good story teller, I loved Nightingale Point for how emotional and well written it was and Homecoming is equally as brilliant. Her writing is compassionate, her characters are the kind you are instantly interested in and the build up of the plot keeps you wanting more. I couldn't put this book down as I became invested in the stories of each character and kept my fingers tightly crossed for a happy ending! A story of friendship, of love and of coming to terms with ones past, Homecoming is an intimate tale of three individuals all connected by one person, who have the power to heal each other.

Luan Goldie is a literary genius. It takes a lot for me to be lost for words, but I almost am! I've had to wait a while to come back to write my review because otherwise I'd just be writing "read this book" on repeat multiple times.

Three people, who are both the closest of family but virtual strangers, are prompted into fixing wounds that might not seem able to heal when Kiama approaches Yvone - the mother he hasn't seen since he was a child. And when he asks her for the answers that he desperately needs to fill the emotional and mental gaps in his heart, she knows she owes them to him. Lewis, Kiama's father, wants nothing more than to tug his son away from what he knows will be more pain as well the knowledge he craves.

In this beautiful, unputdownable book, the truth of two decades is gradually unveiled, spanning lifetimes, heartbreaks, loves and losses. Time isn't always kind to us, and we're not always kind to each other, and the consequences of that are shown in these pages. Just as "Nightingale Point" was a must read, "Homecoming" is yet another devastatingly poignant novel, reading to take the world by storm.

Would you like to read the new Luan Goldie book Em? Let me think....YES!!🤩 I loved NIGHTINGALE POINT (I was obsessed 😂) It was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for fiction for a reason...Goldie writes a bloody great story with so much heart and soul!

So HOMECOMING - loved it. There was never any doubt was there?!😂 It’s a story about friendship, love and family, and about coming to terms with your past in order to move forward.

The book spans two decades and is told from the perspectives of Yvonne and Kiama. Yvonne and Emma met as students and their friendship felt really relatable to me. Shortly before Emma graduates, she finds out she is pregnant with Kiama. When Kiama is little, Emma decides to return to Kenya where her parents live but something tragic happens when Kiama is just eight. For years Yvonne has kept her demons buried and focused on moving forward. But her guilt weighs heavily on her heart. Kiama has had to grow up without a mother, and while there is so much he remembers about her, there is still plenty he doesn't know. Lewis wants nothing more than to keep Kiama, his son, safe, but the thought of Kiama dredging up the past worries Lewis deeply. And Lewis doesn’t know if he’s ready to let the only woman he's ever loved back into his life. When Kiama seeks Yvonne out and asks her to come with him to Kenya, the place that holds the answers to his questions, she knows she can't refuse. And this sets in motion an unravelling of the past that no one is ready for.

What I loved most❤️
~ Goldie excels at bringing her characters to life. She makes you believe in them, and champion them. I felt their pleasure and pain.😍
~ I love the way she keeps an element of mystery surrounding what happens to Emma and all is revealed at the end of the book.
~ The writing is funny yet moving, and comes to life off the page as I could picture London and Kenya so clearly in my mind.

Goldie is just brilliant - that’s it 🤣

A story spanning two decades and two countries. A love triangle and a friendship. I enjoyed this book very much. The narrative went backwards and forward from 2010 to 2020 and each time a little more was revealed. I didn't warm to the main male character Lewis - he came across as self centred and selfish but maybe that was intentional. All in all I'd recommend this book.

I had a love/hate relationship with this book. I loved Kiama and felt so invested in his story but I really disliked Yvonne. I can't remember a character I've found so unpleasant for quite a long time. Her selfishness and lack of morality knows no bounds. I'm not sure if the reader is supposed to feel some kind of empathy and understanding for her actions but all I see is a woman who doesn't know what true friendship really means. Two people can easily fall for the same person but lying, sneaking around behind someone's back, that's not a friend. At least do the decent thing and be honest and accept that you may lose your friend, that way you both have a choice.

There is no doubt that this is a talented author and I was hooked by the story but the book just left me angry.

I loved Luan Goldie’s first novel Nightingale Point which was long listed for the Women’s Prize. I’m gutted it wasn’t shortlisted....So I couldn’t wait to read what she had written next! ⁣
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Homecoming is a story of love, coming of age, relationships and friendships, and an unraveling of the past. The story is told in two timelines 20 years apart. Set in London and Kenya the story is told from the perspective of Yvonne and Kiama. ⁣
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Yvonne and Emma are great university friends. When Emma becomes pregnant towards the end of university with Kiama, Yvonne can’t tell her friend that she knows his father Lewis better than anyone would think. Emma decides to move back in with her wealthy parents in Kenya but tragedy strikes and young Kiama is left with no mother. ⁣
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Years later Kiama seeks out Yvonne and asks her to join him on a trip to Kenya to find answers. ⁣
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I thought Kiama was a very well written, endearing character. 💕 Something I love about Luan Goldie’s writing is that her characters are sharply observed and their relationships are believable. ⁣
However, there’s an element of mystery in this book that’s drawn out a bit too long and means that the pacing of the novel is a little slow. ⁣
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Overall it’s a great read ... I was championing all the characters and felt invested in their joy, pain and development. The writing flowed nicely and the style was easy to read. Definitely one to look out for! 🤗⁣
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Thanks to @netgalley and @hqstories for my eARC. Homecoming is published in the UK on the 6th August.

Loved this book!
Such an interesting story. I enjoyed the way it was told from two characters perspectives and how they went back in time at intervals to explain the story.
I was rooting for all the characters even though they are all so different.

I. Sorry but I could not get into this book at all. It was too slow and could not hold my interest.

Thank you to Netgalley for my copy.

This could have been such a fantastic tale, a clandeetine love story spanning two decades, sweeping across two countries, and two continents. A tragedy dividing them, and guilt keeping them apart, except, the story didn't quite deliver.
The story should have been vibrant, full of passion and angst. Instead it was dreary, dull, and lifeless.
I struggled to get to the end of this book, not a page turner.

This is an anguished novel ridden with secrets and guilt. Yvonne the main character is a student at the start of the novel living in grubby accommodation with her new best friend Emma. Yvonne is stoutly conventional and slightly buttoned up while Emma is wilder and carefree and then the awful thing happens which precipitates all the other events in the story.

The awful thing is that Emma has met a man called Lewis and, when he comes round, Yvonne realises that she had a one night stand with him a few weeks previously. Instead of sharing this and having a chuckle with her good friend she keeps it a secret although you really have to ask why in the 21st-century. As things develop, it turns out that Lewis lost her phone number after their encounter (bizarrely stored on a piece of paper) but still fancies her and then Emma has to go and get pregnant. This all happened in 2001 and the story then bounces between the present day and 2010 as well as relocating to Kenya for a while where Emma was brought up. It’s hard to follow because Yvonne is pretty much the same throughout except she has a slightly cleaner flat. She’s a misery! Every social occasion she seems to end up crying, being sick or leaving early and fails to have an honest talk to Emma at any moment or to give up a fragmented and inadequate relationship with Lewis.

Without giving any more away, there’s a subplot about Kenya where Emma tragically died and a good deal about Kiama who is the son of Emma and Lewis. You have to feel sorry for him, completely messed up by the death of his mother and the web of lies spun by Lewis and Yvonne. Lewis is a strangely opaque character, involved in his son’s life on an irregular basis over twenty years and unable to commit to anyone let alone Yvonne.

In the end it kind of turns out all right with some kind of brightness at the end of a dark tunnel but it has been a tormented ride for everybody including the reader! That would be okay if the trigger for it wasn’t really so unimportant. Right at the start, Yvonne could have said, well, there’s a coincidence and, if Lewis and Emma had broken up their new and certainly not fully formed relationship, Yvonne could have had another go.

However, if you like the misfortunes of other people and the complexities they can drag themselves into it’s a well written and nicely observed story. The jumping around from year to year complicates things sometimes but it gets there in the end.

Home' can mean so many things in theory, but what is it in the truest sense? This beautifully written novel resonates on many levels & asks important questions about love, friendship, family. A truly thought-provoking and engaging book.

Emma and Yvonne meet as students. Emma is seeing Lewis, not knowing that Yvonne had a one night stand with him, but decided to keep it secret from her, especially when she finds out that Emma is pregnant with Lewis’s baby.

Emma returns to Kenya, where her parents live, with her son Kiama but sadly she dies when he is eight. He returns to England to live with his father.

Kiama is now eighteen and he wants to go back to Kenya and find out more about his mother and her death, he turns to Yvonne for help.

I really enjoyed this book and loved the friendship between Emma and Yvonne. The story alternates between 2001, where we get to see the friendship between the girls and the present time.

I have not read Nightingale Point but after loving this book I will now.

Thank you to Netgalley for my copy in exchange for a review.

Absolutely loved this book!!! Would wholeheartedly recommend to all of my friends, and I cannot wait to read more from this author.

I wanted to like this book. I really tried but in the end I just didn't care about either the story or the main characters. Which I have to say is a real shame as the synopsis promised so much.

This story gets off to an enjoyable start. We quickly understand that the narrative switches in various ways. In terms of place, we move between England and Kenya. The narration swaps between two main characters, Yvonne and Kiama. And the timeline is sometimes now, sometimes back in the early 2000s. So far, so good.

I liked how the story unfolds - the reader knows some things but other remain a mystery. Links are gradually made and, bit by bit, we realise how everything fits together. But the book feels a bit overwritten, with too much unnecessary detail. This slows the pace, making it less and less appealing to read as the book progresses.

Overall, I enjoyed the premise and the basic story. I'd have liked it to be more sharply written, but I was overall pleased to have had the opportunity to read it.

With thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for a review copy.

I raced through this one, I felt gripped and compelled to find out how the story was going to unfold but about 70% through I started to piece it together and I just felt like the ending was a bit flat.

That aside, the author really gripped me with the subtly of the build up. Told from two people's perspectives and at different points over a 20 year history, the reader can start to join the dots on what happened to two university friends. I found the relationship between Emma and Yvonne to be very real and honest. They struggled to adapt to each others lives post university, they argued, they didn't see as much of each other as they should have, they were very different personalities....all very real challenges.
I'm keen to know what others think of this one so let me know!

I haven't read Nightingale Point so will definitely add that to my TBR pile as I really like Luan Goldie's style and pace of writing.

Thank you to @netgalley and @hqstories
for the opportunity to review.
Released in the UK on 6th August 2020.

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I absolutely adored Nightingale point so when I saw this on Net Galley I knew I wanted it! Let me start by saying I really enjoyed this book. I have seen a few reviews now that say its not as good as Nightingale Point and I don't think that's fair, this is a different type of story from Luan and so cannot be compared.

The story is told in dual narrative between Yvonne, the adult who knows the full history of what happened and Kiama, a young man who is trying to come to terms with what happened to him as a child. It also flicks between the past and present. I really enjoyed this character case study of Yvonne and Kiama. I started off really feeling for Yvonne's character and the cruel twist of fate she was dealt but as the book progressed I began to feel that she was a rather selfish where as I loved Kiama more with every page!

I felt the build up was brilliant but the actual event was a bit lacking, I wanted more about how Kiama felt and reacted and how the other characters reacted, especially Emma's parents. Overall another great book from this author and look forward to seeing where she takes us next.