Home

Prompted by a class reunion, Home deals with the experience of homecoming after extended absence and engages with the archaeology of the self in the context of estrangement and belonging. Having taken the decision to emigrate decades earlier, Tompa's unnamed protagonist is caught between two worlds, navigating a journey from one homeland to another, and suddenly facing an upsurge of revelations that have a strong emotional impact. Home takes in landmark events from the past, starting with the youthful ease with which the protagonist had set off on an adventure of a lifetime, and continuing with the personal stories of former classmates - some also scattered around the world, and others who decided to stay put. Home negotiates diverse orders of experience and presumed difference without becoming judgmental, while attention is being drawn to ongoing change over time - be it in the lives of those who opted to stay or to leave.

Andrea Tompa is an award-winning Hungarian novelist, academic and theatre critic based in Budapest. She is former editor of the leading theatre journal Szinhaz (Theatre) and is a member of the prestigious Szechenyi Literary and Arts Academy. To date, Tompa published four acclaimed novels: The Hangman's House/A hoher haza (Kalligram, 2010; translated into English by Bernard Adams, Seagull Books, 2020 - longlisted for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize 2022), Top to Tail/Fejtol es labtol (Kalligram, 2013), Omerta (Jelenkor, 2017 - translated into German by Terezia Mora, Suhrkamp, 2022) and Haza/Home (Jelenkor, 2020) - all dealing in different ways with the history of the Hungarian community in Transylvania (Romania), and for which she received numerous prestigious awards.