Kay’s Book Club
November 15, 2025 @ 11:00 am - 12:30 pm
NOTICE: CHANGE IN DATE
If you’re unable to find this book, there may be an extra copy available. Contact us at northforkreformsynagogue@gmail.com.
This session’s book is Home Ground by Lynn Freed.
First published January 1, 1986. Format 288 pages, Paperback
Published September 1, 1987 by Penguin Books
ISBN 9780140089486 (ISBN10: 0140089489)
The adventures of the Franks are seen through the eyes of the family’s youngest daughter, Ruth, who gives a powerful perspective on her family and on South Africa in the 1950s and 1960s.
Story Line Press, 1999 – Fiction – 273 pages
This coming-of-age story was selected as one of the Notable Books of the Year (1986) by The New York Times Book Review. In its review earlier that year, The Times said Freed’s guileless child-narrator takes us inside the neurosis of South Africa. The Washington Post remarked “Here’s a rarity: a novel about childhood and adolescence that never lapses into self-pity, that rings true … that regards adults sympathetically if unsparingly, that deals with serious thematic material, and that is quite deliciously funny.”
NOTICE: CHANGE IN DATE
Lynn Freed is a South African novelist and academic.
She came to the U.S. first as a foreign exchange student, and then went on to receive an M.A. and Ph.D. in English Literature from Columbia University. She taught at Bennington College, Saint Mary’s College of California, the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Oregon, the University of Montana, and the University of Texas in Austin. Ms Freed’s short fiction, memoirs and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s,[1] The Atlantic Monthly, Southwest Review, The Georgia Review, the Michigan Quarterly Review, Tin House, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Newsday, Mirabella, House Beautiful, House & Garden, and Vogue Magazine. Her work is widely translated and anthologized, and has been listed in Best American Short Stories and in The O. Henry Award Prize Stories.
Ms. Freed is Professor of English at the University of California, Davis, and lives in Northern California.
I asked Gail Kriegel, our member, to say a few words about Lynn Freed who died this past May. These are her comments:
“Lynn was a dear friend of mine. She was terrifically funny! She had something to say, in her elegant South African accent, about everything and everybody. She mostly wrote about her very unusual family – she was always miming her mother and father so we all had a very clear portrait of what her eccentric parents were like. Because they were theatre people, and she knew everything about the theatre, she was enormous help to me because at the time, I was going into the premiere production of my play ON THE HOME FRONT . She accompanied me many times to the theater for pre production business meetings and helped me work out script problems and my relationships with the producers and director. I attribute the very great success the play had there to her devoted help and friendship. Lynn was a beautiful human being – smarter than anyone I’ve known, a brilliant wit and very, very funny.”