Book Launch: “Welcome Home, Stranger” by Kate Christensen with Caitlyn Shetterly

Join us at Mechanics’ Hall on January 25th for an incredible evening with two authors who have Maine ties as we celebrate the release of “Welcome Home, Stranger” by acclaimed author Kate Christensen. This literary event will feature a captivating conversation with Caitlyn Shetterly, adding depth and insight to the narrative.

Date: January 25, 2024
Time: 5:30 P.M. Location: Mechanics’ Hall, Portland

Visit here to Register for the Event! 

Christensen is a forceful writer whose . . . prose is visceral and poetic. . . . She is a portrait artist, drawing in miniature, capturing the light within.” —San Francisco Chronicle

From the PEN-Faulkner Award-winning author of The Great Man comes a novel about grief, love, growing older, and the complications of family that is the story of a fifty-something woman who goes home—reluctantly—to Maine after the death of her mother.

Can you ever truly go home again?

An environmental journalist in Washington, DC, Rachel has shunned her New England working-class family for years. Divorced and childless in her middle age, she’s a true independent spirit with the pain and experience to prove it. Coping with challenges large and small, she thinks her life is in free fall–until she’s summoned home to deal with the aftermath of her mother’s death.

Then things really fall apart.

Surrounded by a cast of sometimes comic, sometimes heartbreakingly serious characters—an arriviste sister, an alcoholic brother-in-law and, most importantly, the love of her life recently married to the sister’s best friend–Rachel must come to terms with her past, the sorrow she has long buried, and the ghost of the mother who, for better and worse, made her the woman she is.

Lively, witty, and painfully familiar, this sophisticated and emotionally resonant novel from the author of The Great Man holds a mirror up to modern life as it considers the way some of us must carry on now.

Kate Christensen’s new novel, Welcome Home, Stranger, is a revelation, offering characters as real as your family and friends, a rich, vividly drawn setting, grab-you-by-the-throat drama and always, lurking in the shadows, a fierce authorial intelligence. What more could you ask?

-Richard Russo, author of ‘Somebody’s Fool’

Kate Christensen is the author of six prior novels, including The Astral, and the memoir Blue Plate Special. The Great Man won the 2008 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. She has written reviews and essays for numerous publications, including The New York Times, Vogue, Elle, The Wall Street Journal, and Food & Wine. She lives with her husband in Portland, Maine. www.katechristensen.net

Caitlin Shetterly is the author of the recent novel, Pete and Alice in Maine, which Allegra Goodman reviewed for The New York Times as a “debut [that] achieves a subtle grace, a quality of light and shadow worthy of a Bergman film.” A Maine native, Shetterly is the author of three previous books, including the bestselling Fault Lines: Stories of Divorce. She graduated with honors from Brown University and now lives with her two sons and husband in her home state. She held her book launch for Pete and Alice in Maine at Mechanics’ Hall last summer.

Visit here to Register for the Event!