New Home for Homes

by John F. Baker -- Publishers Weekly, 1/17/2005

Novelist and short story writer A.M. Homes, author of such iconoclastic works as Music for Torching and The End of Alice, has found a new publisher at Viking, where associate publisher Paul Slovak just signed her for a new novel and a memoir about her own adoption. Homes's fifth novel, to be published in spring of next year, is This Book Will Save Your Life, which describes how a desolate middle-aged man in Los Angeles, spurred by a mysterious pain and an accident to his house, gradually begins to reconnect with a world he had virtually abandoned. The memoir, The Mistress's Daughter, will expand on a recent New Yorker essay in which Homes describes how her birth parents sought her out in adulthood, and what she found out about herself and them as a result. Slovak signed Homes, who was previously published at Harper and Scribner, with Sarah Chalfant at Andrew Wylie.