I enjoyed the first third of this book, but the rest was a dog to get through - no diversity in experience, long winded historical tangents, and irrelevant side stories. Disappointing.

A phenominal memoir. I really enjoyed dipping in and out of this book. Thank you to the published for an advanced copy.

Home/Land by Rebecca Mead is a memoir about the English-born writer’s return to her home country with her husband George and their teenage son Rafael around the time of Donald Trump’s election to the presidency, Mead had lived in New York for three decades, so I was expecting more content about her specific experiences of acclimatising to living in the UK again. Instead, the reflections on the meaning of home, belonging, foreignness, family connections and the foundations we are built on are meandering but still engaging.

Home/Land is Rebecca Mead's memoir about her and her family's relocation from New York back to England.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for giving me a copy of this book!

Home/Land wasn't quite what I expected it to be, but I still enjoyed it quite a bit. I was expecting it to be more emotionally-driven than it was, perhaps to meditate on the concept of home a bit more, when actually it's quite driven by facts and events. Mead paints vivid pictures of London and New York, right down to the tiny details, and intersperses it with facts and niche historical details. It's a really well thought out, and clearly very well researched memoir, that is at times a little dense. I really liked getting to see her family history and how that had affected her choices up to now, and such a vivid picture of her family.

Overall this was an enjoyable read from someone with very different life experiences to me, and I found it interesting and informative

After three decades of living in New York, the author decides to go back to her roots and return to England - where she hasn’t lived since her late teens. They move from one politically divided nation with a unfavourable new president to one of Brexit and raising a thirteen-year old son.

This book was slightly middle of the road for me, I didn’t enjoy it but I didn’t dislike it. The journey of exploring Mead’s family history was interesting, and it was well written but I found it hard to get into and be engaged with the memoir.

An insightful memoir about US-UK expat life by Rebecca Mead, whose writings in the New Yorker I have enjoyed reading. As an expat myself who has been working at British international schools, many of the author's feelings and observations strongly resonate with my own. The author is a British journalist who moved to New York as a student, and ended up living there for 30 years, marrying and raising her son, before deciding to move back to London with her family in 2018. She reflects upon her experience as a British expat in America, from her early days as a student, to the post-9/11 days, to the aftermath of the 2016 US presidential elections, and exploring her own complex, multi-layered notions of what makes a place "home". Focusing on her family's recent move to London and her experience of re-assimilating to a homeland she left long ago, the author interweaves narratives of her own family history (which admittedly can feel a bit tedious at times) and bits and pieces of London's history (ranging from Boudicca to modern-day railway expansions). I especially enjoyed reading her profound thoughts on her teenage son's experience of being a "third-culture kid", and how she has given him the "gift" of a lost home to long for, just as she herself once experienced. As someone who teaches such "third-culture kids", I will definitely be recommending this book to my colleagues and expat parents, as I am sure many of them too will find their own experiences reflected in Rebecca Mead's journey.

After the 2016 election, Mead, a British expat in New York, experienced a prescient feeling of dread: Some “future crisis” might “cause America to close its doors to noncitizens,” stranding her in England and separating her from her American family. While she overcame this fear by becoming an American citizen and returning to the U.K., it had stoked one of the most soul-taxing questions of moving away. Where do we really belong?

Nominally, “Home/Land” chronicles her move from New York to London, but in reality, it is as hard to say where the book is set as it is to say what, exactly, it is about. The text ricochets from reporting to recollection and from past to present, veering from Mead’s youth in the coastal town of Weymouth to her adulthood in the stately Brooklyn neighborhood of Fort Greene. So many of Mead’s digressions amount to piquant micro-articles about the history of London, Weymouth, Hartlepool and New York.

I really wanted to like this book as it was centered in both London, where I live and New York which I love so much it has become my second home, Finding a sense of home and community has been something I have been searching for decades and i found myself relating to many of the questions the author raises here.: What does it mean to leave the place you have adopted as home and country? And what is the value and cost of uprooting yourself?" However I found the authors style overly wordy, excessively flowery and I was left with no real sense of either place.

In 'Home/Land', Rebecca Mead uses her decision to return to the UK with her husband and teenage son after three decades living in New York as the jumping-off point for an exploration of the meaning of home.

Mead's writing is both intensely personal and extraordinarily wide-ranging: much of the book is preoccupied with her homes in Weymouth, Brooklyn and London, as well as her working-class family history going back several generations, but there are frequent forays into literature, current affairs, social history. architecture, archaeology, geology and much more. Mead takes us off in quite surprising directions, and the book often feels quite meandering in nature, but as with her wonderful previous memoir, 'The Road to Middlemarch', her writing is beautiful and honest, and the connections she makes are immensely perceptive, even if this book has a much wider focus. It also reminded me a lot of Rebecca Solnit's writing.

The timing of the book is interesting - it is mainly set in 2016-2017, around the time of the Brexit referendum and Trump's election victory, events that felt cataclysmic at the time but have now been overshadowed by more recent developments - to which Mead does allude later on in the book.

Overall, I found this an engaging and at times rather moving book. Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for sending me an ARC to review.

This is a tricky book to review because it's so personal, and I think that's what kept me from fully enjoying it--as an American who moved to the UK I thought it would be interesting to see my story told in reverse, but Mead mostly uses this book as an airing out of her family grievances and exploring her roots (which are extremely white, mid-working-class, without much to say about the England of today). I tend to enjoy memoirs that have a bit more to say about the larger world around them, and this is effectively a diary. Mead is a talented writer but this just wasn't for me.