A M Homes Books In Order

Novels

  1. Jack (1989)
  2. In a Country of Mothers (1993)
  3. The End of Alice (1996)
  4. Music for Torching (1999)
  5. This Book Will Save Your Life (2006)
  6. May We be Forgiven (2012)
  7. The Unfolding (2022)

Collections

  1. The Safety of Objects (1990)
  2. Things You Should Know (2002)
  3. Poolside (2007)
  4. Days of Awe (2018)

Novellas

  1. Hello Everybody (2012)

Non fiction

  1. Appendix A (1996)
  2. Los Angeles (2002)
  3. The Mistress’s Daughter (2007)

Novels Book Covers

Collections Book Covers

Novellas Book Covers

Non fiction Book Covers

A M Homes Books Overview

Jack

Jack is a teenager who wants nothing more than to be normal even if being normal means having divorced parents and a rather strange best friend. But when Jack’s father takes him out in a rowboat on Lake Watchmayoyo and tells his son that he’s gay, nothing will ever be normal again.

In a Country of Mothers

No relationship is more charged than that between a psychotherapist and her patient unless it is the relationship between a mother and her daughter. This disturbing literary thriller explores what happens when the line between those relationships blurs. Jody Goodman enters psychotherapy with questions of career and love on her mind. But Claire Roth, her therapist, keeps changing the focus of their sessions to Jody’s parentage Jody was adopted; Claire gave up a baby for adoption who would now be exactly Jody’s age. As the two women become increasingly involved, speculation turns into certainty, fantasy into fixation. Until suddenly it is no longer clear just which of them needs the other more or with more terrifying consequences.

The End of Alice

Only a work of such searing, meticulously controlled brilliance could provoke such a wide range of visceral responses. Here is the incredible story of an imprisoned pedophile who is drawn into an erotically charged correspondence with a nineteen year old suburban coed. As the two reveal and revel in their obsessive desires, Homes creates in The End of Alice a novel that is part romance, part horror story, at once unnerving and seductive.

Music for Torching

In Music for Torching, the controversial author of The End of Alice lays bare the foundations of marriage and family life at the end of the century. Flash frozen in the anxious culture of a suburban subdivision, Paul and Elaine the couple first featured in Homes’s collection of stories The Saftey Objects have two boys and a beautiful home, yet they find themselves thoroughly inexplicably stuck. Obsessed with ‘making things good again,’ they spin the quiet terrors of family life into fantastical frenzy that careens out of control, doing and saying all the things we dare not, throwing into full relief the chasm between our public and private selves. From a strange and hilarious encounter on the floor of the pantry with a Stepford wife neighbor, to an ill concieved plan for a tattoo, to a sexy town cop who shows up at every inopportuune moment, to house cleaning team in space suits, to a mistress calling on the cell phone, to a hostage situation at the school, Homes creates characters so outrageously flawed and deeply human that they are entirely believable. With Music for Torching, A.M. Homes brings her unnerving emotional intensity to the heart of America, creating a new and dangerous territory that is distinctly her own.

This Book Will Save Your Life

From the author of Music for Torching an uplifting and apocalyptic tale set in Los Angeles about one man’s efforts to bring himself back to life Since her debut in 1989, A. M. Homes has been among the boldest and most original voices of her generation, acclaimed for the psychological accuracy and unnerving emotional intensity of her storytelling. Her keen ability to explore how extraordinary the ordinary can be is at the heart of her touching and funny new novel, her first in six years. Richard Novak is a modern day Everyman, a middle aged divorc trading stocks out of his home. He has done such a good job getting his life under control that he needs no one except his trainer, nutritionist, and housekeeper. He is functionally dead and doesn’t even notice until two incidents an attack of intense pain that lands him in the emergency room, and the discovery of an expanding sinkhole outside his house conspire to hurl him back into the world. On his way home from the hospital, Richard forms the first of many new relationships: He meets Anhil, the doughnut shop owner, an immigrant who dreams big. He finds a weeping housewife in the produce section of the supermarket, helps save a horse that has fallen into the sinkhole, daringly rescues a woman from the trunk of her kidnapper’s car, and, after the sinkhole claims his house and he has to relocate to a Malibu rental, he befriends a reluctant counterculture icon. In the end, Richard is also brought back in closer touch with his family his aging parents, his brilliant brother, the beloved ex wife whom he still desires, and finally, before the story’s breathtaking finale, with his estranged son Ben. The promised land of Los Angeles a surreal city of earthquakes, wildfires, mudslides, and feral Chihuahuas is also very much a character in This Book Will Save Your Life. A vivid, revealing novel about compassion, transformation, and what can happen if you are willing to lose yourself and open up to the world around you, it should significantly broaden Homes’s already substantial audience.

The Safety of Objects

Published to overwhelming critical acclaim, this extraordinary collection of short stories established A. M. Homes as one of the most provocative and daring writers of her generation. Here you’ll find the cult classic ‘A Real Doll,’ the tale of a teenage boy’s erotic obsession with his sister’s favorite doll; ‘Adults Alone,’ which first introduced Paul and Elaine, the crack smoking yuppie couple whose marriage careens out of control in Homes’s novel Music for Torching; and ‘Looking for Johnny,’ in which a kidnapped boy, having failed his abductor’s expectations, is returned home.

Brilliantly conceived, sharply etched, and exceptionally satisfying, these stories explore the American dream in ways you’re not likely soon to forget. Working in Kodacolor hues, Homes offers an uncanny picture of a surreal suburbia outrageous and utterly believable.

Things You Should Know

In this stunningly original collection, A. M. Homes writes with terrifying compassion about the things that matter most. Homes’s distinctive narrative illuminates our dreams and desires, our memories and losses, and demonstrates how extraordinary the ordinary can be. With uncanny emotional accuracy, wit, and empathy, Homes takes us places we recognize but would rather not go alone.

Poolside

Poolside is a waterproof collection of fourteen stories about the satisfactions and tribulations of swimming lessons, summer scenes at club pools, chance encounters at the rec center and just plain floating. The perfect companion for a day of dipping and people watching, Poolside is as necessary as sunscreen for achieving maximum Poolside bliss. Poolside features internationally acclaimed authors Alice Adams, John Updike, Joyce Carol Oates, David Foster Wallace, Ernest Hemingway, John Cheever, and AM Homes, as well as emerging voices such as Julie Orringer and Andrea Lee.

Los Angeles

The City of Angels possibly the most surreal place in the United States is a unique amalgam of past and present, tradition and revolution, dreamscape and reality. Whether in history books or on the silver screen, the Los Angeles landscape has long served as an ever shifting backdrop against which countless American anxieties and aspirations play out.

In Los Angeles, the New York based novelist and short story writer A. M. Homes checks us into the famed hotel Chateau Marmont and uses life at this iconic landmark as a multifaceted prism through which she views and experiences Los Angeles culture, past and present. Built in the 1920s, the Chateau Marmont is where the famous and infamous have always come to stay some for a few days, others for months at a time and sometimes, like John Belushi, to die. It is a mythological mecca, the focal point for a city of visionaries, romantics, and dreamers. And it is the site where Homes, as she mines the strange heart of Los Angeles, shows herself to be an uncommonly nimble and entertaining cultural anthropologist.

The Mistress’s Daughter

An acclaimed novelist’s riveting memoir about what it means to be adopted and how all of us construct our sense of self and family

Before A.M. Homes was born, she was put up for adoption. Her birth mother was a twenty two year old single woman who was having an affair with a much older married man with children of his own. The Mistress s Daughter is the story of what happened when, thirty years later, her birth parents came looking for her.

Homes, renowned for the psychological accuracy and emotional intensity of her storytelling, tells how her birth parents initially made contact with her and what happened afterward her mother stalked her and appeared unannounced at a reading and what she was able to reconstruct about the story of their lives and their families. Her birth mother, a complex and lonely woman, never married or had another child, and died of kidney failure in 1998; her birth father, who initially made overtures about inviting her into his family, never did.

Then the story jumps forward several years to when Homes opens the boxes of her mother s memorabilia. She had hoped to find her mother in those boxes, to know her secrets, but no relief came. She became increasingly obsessed with finding out as much as she could about all four parents and their families, hiring researchers and spending hours poring through newspaper morgues, municipal archives and genealogical Web sites. This brave, daring, and funny book is a story about what it means to be adopted, but it is also about identity and how all of us define our sense of self and family.

Related Authors

Leave a Comment