January 2026 Book, Home

Talk About Books meets the third Wednesday of the month at the Guilford Free Library. Winter meeting time is at 5:30.

 Home tells the story of Frank Money, an African-American veteran traumatized by his experiences in the Korean war. He has been back in America for a year, but feels too violent and dislocated to go home to Georgia, where his younger sister still lives. As the novel opens, Frank finds himself restrained in a hospital, but can't remember exactly why he's there. He has received a mysterious letter from a woman named Sarah, telling him that he must hurry home and rescue his younger sister from some unnamed danger: "Come fast. She be dead if you tarry." So Frank breaks out of the hospital, shoeless in the dead of the winter, and begins to make his way cross-country to Georgia, relying on the kindness of strangers and trying to suppress his traumatic memories of the war as he goes.  Morrison cross-cuts Frank's story with that of his sister, Ycidra, known as Cee, who left home at 14 with "a rat" who called himself Prince. He has since run off, and Cee finds a job as a medical assistant for a white doctor named Beauregard Scott; his housekeeper, Sarah, shows Cee his office, where, gazing in awe at titles such as The Passing of the Great Race, and Heredity, Race and Society, she innocently wonders what "eugenics" means. It is a powerful set-up, building suspense and a mounting sense of anxiety: what terrible things are going to happen to Cee, and how will Frank save her, when he can't save himself?