Welcome Home: A Memoir with Selected Photographs and Letters

'The revival of the great Lucia Berlin continues apace' New York Times

'A jigsaw-puzzle portrait of a long-neglected literary legend, baring the autobiographical material that filtered so forcefully into her fiction' Vogue

Best known for her short fiction, it was upon publication of A Manual for Cleaning Women in 2015 that Lucia Berlin's status as a great American writer was widely celebrated. To populate her stories - the places, relationships, the sentiments - Berlin often drew on her own rich, itinerant life.

Before Berlin died, she was working on a book of previously unpublished autobiographical sketches called Welcome Home. The work consisted of more than twenty chapters that started in 1936 in Alaska and ended (prematurely) in 1966 in southern Mexico. In our publication of Welcome Home, her son Jeff Berlin is filling in the gaps with letters from, and photos of, friends and lovers drawn from her eventful, romantic, and tragic life.

'[Berlin] writes candidly about what she enjoyed and endured . . . Whether describing lucky breaks or hard knocks, her prose is intense and intimate, at once disconcerting and entrancing' The Economist

'This never-before-published memoir [is] cause for jubilation' Boston Globe