Speak to Me of Home
From the author of the runaway bestseller American Dirt
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- Pre-Order
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- Expected 13 May 2025
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- £11.99
Publisher Description
'A riveting tale of three generations, this is storytelling at its finest' JOHN BOYNE
'Utterly absorbing, a big, sweeping story of family and identity' EDEL COFFEY
'Why hadn't she said to her daughter I love you beyond reason and none of this matters at all and every day that you breathe is a gift?'
Rafaela remembers everything that matters: her beautiful childhood in San Juan, her marriage to Peter, uprooting their children, Ruth and Benny, to the American Midwest, and losing all sense of her place in the world. So she tells no one when her memory begins to slip.
Her daughter, in New York with a family of her own, wishes she could forget her muddy feelings about where she comes from - the same feelings which motivated her 22-year-old daughter Daisy to reconnect with their past.
Daisy, who has momentarily forgotten everything, hears the word critical in a hospital room in San Juan and remembers, all at once, the car that hurtled towards her, the terrible storm, and something else. What was it?
Now Ruth and Rafaela must return to the city where it all began, to gather by Daisy's bedside and confront the twists of fate that have caused a growing rift in their family and led them to this moment.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Cummins (American Dirt) serves up an engrossing if occasionally cloying family drama. In 2023 Palisades, N.Y., Ruth Hayes receives a phone call from a hospital in Puerto Rico. Her daughter, Daisy, who recently left college over Ruth's objections and moved to the island, has been hit by a car. From there, the narrative rewinds to San Juan in 1968, as Daisy's maternal grandmother, Rafaela Acuña y Daubón, prepares to marry her Irish American fiancé, Peter, despite his parents' misgivings. Later, when Peter moves his wife and two small kids back to his native Missouri, the cracks in their marriage deepen. Cummins devotes later sections to Ruth, both as a child in St. Louis watching her mother struggle and as an adult, mystified by her own three children. When her youngest, born Charlie Hayes, decides to change his name to Carlos Hayes-Acuña, Ruth feels "a tiny flare of anger... what right did Charlie have to try on as if it were a costume?" Despite some melodramatic moments and convoluted twists, Cummins succeeds at breathing life into her large cast of characters and excels at depicting the nuances of a mother-daughter relationship. This is worth a look.
