About the Author
BRITTANI SONNENBERG was raised across three continents and has worked as a journalist in Germany, in China, and throughout Southeast Asia. A graduate of Harvard, she received her MFA in fiction from the University of Michigan. Her fiction has been published in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2008 as well as Ploughshares, Short Fiction, and Asymptote. Her nonfiction has appeared in Time, the Associated Press, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and NPR Berlin. She has taught creative writing at the University of Michigan, Carleton College, and the University of Hong Kong. She is currently based in Berlin. Home Leave is her first novel.
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Welcome
Dedication
Map
Epigraph
Part One1116 Arcadia Ave.
Wittenberg Village
Good Luck
Morning, Broken
The Good Years
The Six-Month Layover
Part ThreeMechthild
The People’s Square
Home Leave
The Heat
Safety
August 22, 1996
Part FourSophie and Leah
I’ll Be Home for Christmas
Higher Education
Voice Recognition
A Taste of Blood
Reading Group Guide
About the Author
Newsletters
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2014 by Brittani Sonnenberg
Cover design by Brigid Pearson
Cover photo illustration by Tom Hallman (family)
Cover photos by Alamy (Shanghai) and Shutterstock (Minneapolis, Bali, Atlanta, Berlin, Hamburg, London, Singapore)
Cover copyright © 2014 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitutes unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
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First ebook edition: June 2014
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Scripture taken from the New King James Version. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc.
“1116 Arcadia Ave.” was published in modified form in Asymptote (www.asymptotejournal.com) in 2012.
“Sonnets to Orpheus” by Rainer Maria Rilke, from In Praise of Mortality, English translation copyright © 2005 by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy. Reprinted by permission of the translators.
ISBN 978-1-4555-4835-4
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