This Midwest Connections Pick
is now available in paperback!
SING THEM HOME
by Stephanie Kallos
Grove Press
$14.95 Trade Paperback
with Reading Group Guide
ISBN 978-0-8021-4413-3
Grove/Atlantic / PGW
www.groveatlantic.com
Atlantic Monthly Press
ISBN 978-0-87113-963-4
$25.00 Hardcover
“Not since the Wizard of Oz has a tornado been used to such potent literary effect. . . . Dorothy may have thought that there’s no place like home, but what happens when there’s no house left at the old address, and no real parent figure to go home to? The Jones siblings take a further step down the road to enlightenment: They learn that home is where the heart is. . . . Kallos performs ample wizardry in blending both tears and quirky humor in this tale of lost souls.” —Seattle Times
“This morning I made a smoothie, thought about tornados, shook the blender just the way the book described, and wanted to go right back to the couch and finish SING THEM HOME. I’m in the whirl of Kallos’ talent! Her lyricism and wisdom are on display as she creates a cast of small town characters who are as lovable as they are confounding–lives poised for redemption. This is a book you will cherish and wish could go on forever.”
- Sarah Bagby, Watermark Books & Café, Wichita, KS“SING THEM HOME is simply wonderful. It’s a welcome tonic to those of us who look back with great longing to Anne Tyler’s early novels. . . . That is, those of us hungry for books with quirky, flawed, yet realistic and beloved characters who leap off the page into our arms and refuse to leave. I didn’t want SING THEM HOME ever to end.” —Nancy Pearl, KUOW/NPR online
“Fans of Ann Patchett and Haven Kimmel should dive onto the sofa . . .with Stephanie Kallos’s wonderfully transportive second novel, SING THEM HOME. . . . As the novel floats back and forth from past to present, Kallos patiently reveals the hurt and longing that’s pounding beneath the surface . . . [and] the ending may leave you feeling so wistful for these strange, sad people that you find yourself fantasizing about a trip to Nebraska.” —Entertainment Weekly
MBA Bookseller Information
For more information about this book, please contact your PGW rep or Grove/Atlantic.
SING THEM HOME will be advertised in the 2009 MBA Catalog, coming in early November.
Stephanie Kallos is a featured speaker at the 2009 MBA Trade Show AUTHORS LUNCH. If you would like to inquire about events or phoners with Stephanie Kallos, please contact Senior Publicist Martin Wilson, martin.wilson@groveatlantic.com, 212.614.7867.
Downloads
- Full color sign/flyer (PDF)
- Black & white ad (PDF)
- Author Q&A (PDF)
- Author biography (PDF)
- Publisher press release (PDF) — Trade Paperback
- Publisher press release (PDF) — Hardcover
- Author photo (JPG)
- Book photo (JPG) — Trade Paperback
- Book photo (JPG) — Hardcover
- Midwest Connections Generic Display Materials
- Midwest Connections Rebate Form (PDF) — rebates were available only for the hardcover
About the Book
“With empathy and wit, Kallos weaves together the stories of the living and the dead, creating a world in which love trumps loss and faith can summon redemption. The result is a magical novel that even cynics will close with a smile.”—People
“SING THEM HOME constantly surprises, changing voices, viewpoints, and tempos, mixing humor and pathos, and introducing a big cast of vividly portrayed characters, major and minor. Readers who admired Kallos’s first novel, Broken for You, will likely embrace SING THEM HOME, and it will embrace them in return. It’s that sort of book.”— Boston Globe
“Kallos’s enthralling second novel takes the reader by storm…. [SING THEM HOME] will find a welcome audience in anyone who has experienced grief, struggled with family ties or, most importantly, appreciates blossoming talent.”
- Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Until she was five years old, novelist Stephanie Kallos—author of the bestselling Broken for You—lived in Wymore, Nebraska on an idyllic street with a 19th-century farmhouse next door. But in 1974, a tornado swept through town, taking the neighbors’ house with it. Although no one was injured, the only thing that came down from the sky in any recognizable form was a baby grand piano, which was documented in a photograph that ran in the March 1974 issue of National Geographic. “How can a deep freezer just disappear? How can a washing machine disappear?” Kallos wondered. “These questions—and their implications—have haunted me ever since.” This scenario planted the seed for Kallos’s second novel, SING THEM HOME, a sweeping, gorgeously crafted family story set in the American heartland.
SING THEM HOME is a deeply moving portrait of three grown siblings who have lived in the shadow of unresolved grief since their mother’s mysterious disappearance when they were children. Everyone in Emlyn Springs, Nebraska, knows the story of Hope Jones, the physician’s wife whose big dreams for their tiny town were lost along with her in the tornado of 1978. For Hope’s three young children, the stability of life with their distant, preoccupied father, and with Viney, their mother’s spitfire best friend, is no match for their mother’s absence.
Larken, the eldest, is an art history professor who seeks in food an answer to a less tangible hunger; Gaelan, the only son, is a telegenic weatherman who devotes his life to predicting the unpredictable and whose profession, and all too much more, depend on his sculpted frame and ready smile; and Bonnie, the baby of the family is a self-proclaimed archivist who combs the roadsides for clues to her mother’s legacy, and permission to move on. When, decades after their mother’s disappearance, they are summoned home after their father’s sudden death, they are forced to revisit the childhood tragedy at the center of their lives.
With breathtaking lyricism, wisdom, and humor, Stephanie Kallos explores the consequences of protecting the ones we love. SING THEM HOME is a magnificent tapestry of lives connected and undone by tragedy, lives poised-unbeknownst to the characters themselves-for redemption.
STEPHANIE KALLOS spent twenty years in the theater as an actress and teacher. Her best-selling, award-winning first novel, Broken for You, has been translated into ten languages and was a selection of the Today Show Book Club. Her fiction has earned Kallos comparisons to John Irving, Anne Tyler, Margaret Atwood, and Carol Shields, establishing her as a writer of uncommon “wisdom and soulfulness” (Sue Monk Kidd).
Kallos lives in Seattle with her husband and two sons.
Midwest Connections Marketing Plans
- $75 in REBATES from MBA for display photos, ads, features in your newsletters, e-newsletters, and on your store website – print out the REBATE FORM above and follow instructions
- Contact the publisher to inquire about bookstore events, book club or reading group appearances, and/or phoners with the author.
- Banner ads for the book on the MBA website
- Flyer/sign PDF file and other materials provided by the publisher
- Reading copies of SING THEM HOME available from Grove/Atlantic and MBA – contact the MBA office if you need a book
- A thought-provoking, deeply affecting novel about family ties that makes a perfect reading group selection.
- Print ad you can run in your local paper – earn a rebate from MBA for your ad!
- Midwest Connections stickers, shelf-talkers, signs, bookmarks for in-store displays – earn a display rebate, too
