Going Home

From award-winning journalist Tom Lamont comes a funny, achingly sad, sneakily wise story of family and what happens when three men – all of whom are completely ill-suited for fatherhood – take charge of a toddler following his mother's sudden death. For fans of Sarah Winman, Andrew O'Hagan's Mayflies and films like Boyhood and Aftersun.

Local boy Téo Erskine is back in the north London suburb of his youth, visiting his father – stubborn, selfish, complicated Vic. Things have changed for Téo: he's got a steady job, a brand-new car and a London flat all concrete and glass, with a sliver of a river view.

Except, underneath the surface, not much has changed at all. He's still the boy seeking his father's approval; the young man playing late-night poker with his best friend, unreliable, infuriating Ben Mossam; the one still desperately in love with the enigmatic Lia Woods.

Lia's life, on the other hand, has been transformed: now a single mum to two-year-old Joel, she doesn't have time for anyone – not even herself.

When the unthinkable happens, Joel finds himself at the centre of an odd constellation of men – Téo, Vic, Ben - none of whom is fully equipped to look after him, but whose strange, tentative attempts at love might just be enough to offer him a new place to call home.

About the Author

Tom Lamont is an award-winning journalist. In 2015, he became one of the founding writers on the Guardian's Long Read desk and since 2017 he has been a regular correspondent for American GQ. He lives in north London with his wife and two children. Going Home is his first novel.

Reviews

"I've read Going Home twice now and I still don't feel as if I've tapped its power. Children seem to be more alive than adults, keener, less jaded, and this novel feels the same, pepped up and gorgeous, just bristling with life" —Olivia Laing, Guardian

"A different kind of love story, beautifully told... An obvious parallel might be the work of Jon McGregor... [it] restored my faith in wholesome novelistic pleasures that work well in good hands but have failed to excite me in recent novels. Several point-of-view narrators are inhabited dutifully, and equally; there's a concentrated locality, many corners of which are shown love and illuminated; a culture; a strong social element, played without manipulative cynicism. There are rolling banks of nice sentences and dialogue that sounds like real speech without sacrificing shape or dynamism. Going Home has the lot. It's been a while since I've read a piece of straightforward British realism and been this impressed." ―Financial Times

"Charm is an underrated quality in fiction... It comes from an alchemical blend of elements including narrative voice and character, and Tom Lamont's debut novel, Going Home, set in the Jewish community in Enfield, north London, has charm to burn... a book that succeeds so strongly through its charm and its heart" —John Self, Observer

"At the centre of Lamont's book are the breathless, torrential outpourings of a child whose magnetism pulls all the adults around him together. In capturing the gradual and thorny journey of Joel and Téo towards becoming father and son, almost despite themselves, Lamont does something remarkable" ―Literary Review

Dimensions: 15.4 x 3 x 23.4 cm