The Homing

After years of living in Los Angeles, pretty young widow Karen Spellman and her two daughters are returning to the lush, verdant countryside of Karen's childhood, where she plans to marry her high-school sweetheart. But something sinister awaits the Spellmans. Something so hideous it seems not earthly, but spawned in Hell. Now Karen must protect her daughters from a malign, preternatural force that must satisfy its gruesome thirst for unsuspecting prey . . . .

A SPECTATOR BOOK OF THE YEAR Longlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year 'Rich and joyous ...The book's quiet optimism about our ability to change, and to learn to love small things passionately, will stay with me for a long time' Helen Macdonald 'Big-hearted and quietly gripping' Guardian 'I love Jon Day's writing and his birds. A marvellous, soaring account' Olivia Laing '[A] beautiful book about unbeautiful birds' Observer 'This is nature writing at its best' Financial Times 'Awash with historical and literary detail, and moving moments ... Wonderful' Telegraph 'Every page of this beautifully written book brought me pleasure' Charlotte Higgins 'A vivid evocation of a remarkable species and a rich working-class tradition. It's also a charming defence of a much-maligned bird, which will make any reader look at our cooing, waddling, junk-food-loving feathered friends very differently in future' Daily Mail 'Endlessly interesting and dazzlingly erudite, this wonderful book will make a home for itself in your heart' Prospect As a boy, Jon Day was fascinated by pigeons, which he used to rescue from the streets of London. Twenty years later he moved away from the city centre to the suburbs to start a family. But in moving house, he began to lose a sense of what it meant to feel at home. Returning to his childhood obsession with the birds, he built a coop in his garden and joined a local pigeon racing club. Over the next few years, as he made a home with his young family in Leyton, he learned to train and race his pigeons, hoping that they might teach him to feel homed. Having lived closely with humans for tens of thousands of years, pigeons have become powerful symbols of peace and domesticity. But they are also much-maligned, and nowadays most people think of these birds, if they do so at all, as vermin. A book about the overlooked beauty of this species, and about what it means to dwell, Homing delves into the curious world of pigeon fancying, explores the scientific mysteries of animal homing, and traces the cultural, political and philosophical meanings of home. It is a book about the making of home and making for home: a book about why we return.

“A noted naturalist explores the centrality of home in the lives of humans and other animals . . . A special treat for readers of natural history” (Kirkus Reviews). Every year, many species make the journey from one place to another, following the same paths and ending up in the same places. Every year since boyhood, the acclaimed scientist and author Bernd Heinrich has done the same, returning to a beloved patch of western Maine woods. Which led him to wonder: What is the biology in humans of this primal pull toward a particular place, and how is it related to animal homing? In The Homing Instinct, Heinrich explores the fascinating mysteries of animal migration: how geese imprint true visual landscape memory; how scent trails are used by many creatures to locate their homes with pinpoint accuracy; and how even the tiniest of songbirds are equipped for solar and magnetic orienteering over vast distances. And he reminds us that to discount our human emotions toward home is to ignore biology itself. “A graceful blend of science and memoir . . . [Heinrich’s] ability to linger and simply be there for the moment when, for instance, an elderly spider descends from a silken strand to take the insect he offers her is the heart of his appeal.” —Julie Zickefoose, The Wall Street Journal “Deep and insightful writing.” —David Gessner, The Washington Post

From the bestselling author of "Guardian," "Creature," and "Black Lightning," a spine-tingling tale of all-consuming evil as riveting and chilling as any he has ever produced. It will be a sweet homecoming for Karen Spellman. After years of living in Los Angeles, the pretty, young widow and her two daughters are returning to the lush countryside of Pleasant Valley, where Karen grew up. In this verdant, fertile place, Karen hopes to find not only a refuge from urban chaos, but love, for she is going home to marry her high school sweetheart. But something sinister awaits her. Something as primal as nature, as demonic as hell itself. For long ago, a shadowy menace stalked Pleasant Valley. A menace forgotten, thought dead. But only sleeping. Now Karen's homecoming will become a confrontation with terror as she battles to protect her daughters from a malign, preternatural force that must satisfy its gruesome thirst for innocent prey . . .

Long-Listed for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay Sarah Menkedick spent her twenties trekking alone across South America, teaching English to recalcitrant teenagers on Reunion Island, picking grapes in France and camping on the Mongolian grasslands; for her, meaning and purpose were to be found on the road, in flight from the ordinary. Yet the biggest and most transformative adventure of her life might be one she never anticipated: at 31, she moves into a tiny 19th-century cabin on her family's Ohio farm, and begins the journey into motherhood. In eight vivid and boldly questioning essays, Menkedick explores the luminous, disorienting time just before and after becoming a mother. As she reacquaints herself with the subtle landscapes of the Midwest, and adjusts to the often surprising physicality of pregnancy, she ruminates on what this new stage of life means for her long-held concepts of self, settling, and creative fulfillment. In “Millie, Mildred, Grandma Menkedick,” she considers the nature of story through the life of her tough German grandmother, who raised two boys as a single mother in the 1950s and then spent her seventies traveling the world with her best friend Marge; in “Motherland,” on a trip back to Oaxaca, Mexico to visit her husband’s family, she finally embraces her Midwestern roots; in “The Milk Cave,” she discovers in breastfeeding a new appreciation for the spiritual and artistic potential of boredom; and in “The Lake,” she revisits her childhood with her father, whose relentless optimism and mystical streak she sees anew once she has a child of her own. A story of a traveler come home to the farm; of becoming a mother in spite of reservations and doubt; and of learning to appreciate the power and beauty of the quotidian, Homing Instincts speaks to the deepest concerns and hopes of a generation.

Originally published in 1907. One of the earliest and possibly the most important book ever published on homing pigeons. The well illustrated and detailed chapters include: The Columba Livia - Origin and Production - Lofts and Fittings - Food and Feeding - Interbreeding - Crossing - Mendel's Law Applied to Homing Pigeons - Founding a Loft - Some Physical Characters - Feathers and the Moult - The Homing Instinct - Training - Preparing for Old Bird races - Preparing for Young Bird Races, etc. Many of the earliest pigeon books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. Home Farm Books are republishing many of these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

Millions of ethnic Koreans have been driven from the Korean Peninsula over the course of the region’s modern history. Emigration was often the personal choice of migrants hoping to escape economic and political hardship, but it was also enforced or encouraged by governmental relocation and migration projects in both colonial and postcolonial times. The turning point in South Korea’s overall migration trajectory occurred in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the nation’s increased economic prosperity and global visibility, along with shifting geopolitical relationships between the First World and Second World, precipitated a migration flow to South Korea. Since the early 1990s, South Korea’s foreign-resident population has soared more than 3,000 percent. Homing investigates the experiences of legacy migrants—later-generation diaspora Koreans who “return” to South Korea—from China, the Commonwealth of Independent States, and the United States. Unlike their parents or grandparents, they have no firsthand experience of their ancestral homeland. They inherited an imagined homeland through memories, stories, pictures, and traditions passed down by family and community, or through images disseminated by the media. When diaspora Koreans migrate to South Korea, they confront far more than a new living situation: they must navigate their own shifting emotions as their expectations for their new homeland—and its expectations of them—confront reality. Everyday experiences and social encounters—whether welcoming or humiliating—all contribute to their sense of belonging in the South. Homing addresses some of the most vexing and pressing issues of contemporary transnational migration—citizenship, cultural belonging, language, and family relationships—and highlights their affective dimensions. Using accounts gleaned through interviews, author Ji-Yeon Jo situates migrant experiences within the historical context of each diaspora. Her book is the first to analyze comparatively the migration experiences of ethnic Koreans from three diverse diaspora, whose presence in South Korea and ongoing relationships with diaspora homelands have challenged and destabilized existing understandings of Korean peoplehood.

This addition to the enormously popular Williamsburg series is set largely against the early part of the Second World War in England during the heroic, nerve-racking years prior to the USA's entry. The author amazingly and convincingly recaptures the mood and tempo of the times, as good a study of British and American morale as can be, the exuberance of spirit in which the challenge and the danger was met. And for the audience that has come to know the Day-Sprague family as familiar friends, with their network of inter-marriages, spanning two countries, this Volume 7 of the series is a most welcome read.