The Home Corner by Ruth Thomas

The Home Corner is the story of a young woman cut loose from the airless confines of school and drifting almost imperceptibly from adolescence to adulthood. The novel covers a period of 19 year-old Luisa McKenzie’s life as she falls between the cracks of society: she has left school, but has no place at uni or any strong desire to move down a particular career path. She has failed her highers and has very few prospects. At some indiscernible point during the last two years she began to shift from being the kind of person engaged in conversations about what universities she was applying to, whether to bother with London or not, whether she wanted catered on non-catered halls, to the kind of person whose possibilities have started to close themselves off, one by one. Without having done very much, she finds herself left behind: sat at the same kitchen table, staring at the same picture she has stared at since she was five. 

Thomas writes Luisa’s story with a deft touch and a subtle lyricism. She grants us access to a kind of imagination not often represented in mainstream literature and in so doing, gives the reader an expert guide for the perils of finding those first tentative few steps in the adult world. Our protagonist is not a hyper-articulate graduate with an unerring ability to dissect psychological motives; but neither is she condescended to as a product of stunted intellect, as perhaps a character of her background would be in a novel by a less egalitarian author. Instead, Luisa is a totally believable, rounded and generous narrator; only the occasional grandiloquent slip betraying her fictionality.

As Luisa steels her soul against a world that seems to have nothing to give her, glimmers of hope begin to flicker through. She begins to connect more with the children in the school and piece together the disparate strands of her recent past. Thomas’s portrayal of the struggles and anxieties of late-adolescence are truly excellent and the empathy with which the story is treated create a warm, engrossing novel.