My Home is Far Away is the story of three young sisters: Lena, Marcia and Florie. After their mother dies, they are left in the care of their philandering father, a travelling salesman, and shuttled from one relative to the next as he wanders the back roads of the American Midwest. The girls sleep in shabby boarding houses and dingy motels, play in dusty small-town streets and cling to the hope that somewhere they might finally belong.When their father remarries, that hope of stability crumbles. Under the rule of a cold and punitive stepmother, every small mistake invites punishment, and the sisters begin to dream not simply of security, but of escape.Drawing deeply on her own childhood, this is Dawn Powell's most autobiographical novel. Told with the immediacy of remembered experience and the insight of adulthood, it is an unforgettable evocation of rural Midwestern life and a moving coming-of-age story about endurance, sisterhood and the longing for a life beyond the limits of circumstance.



DAWN POWELL (1896-1965) was a novelist and playwright known for her satires of New York's cultural and literary circles. Born in Mount Gilead, Ohio, she endured a tumultuous childhood before running away at thirteen to live with an aunt who encouraged her writing aspirations. After graduating from Lake Erie College, Powell moved to New York City, immersing herself in the bohemian atmosphere of Greenwich Village.She gained early recognition for her witty pieces in The New Yorker and Esquire, and in 1939 became a Scribner author, sharing the legendary editor Maxwell Perkins with Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Although Powell enjoyed a devoted circle of admirers, her work drifted into obscurity after her death. Interest in her novels was later revived by the tireless work of Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Tim Page, executor of her estate, and also through Gore Vidal's influential appraisal in The New York Review of Books.



One of the permanent masterpieces of childhood



A book this good can be only one thing: A classic



A huge talent, Dawn Powell. Sentence by sentence, among the greatest writers of her time



Powell is best known for her New York novels, which lambast the affectations of the city's literary scene. But her autobiographical fiction about her childhood in Ohio suggest that she got a useful education as a social satirist in the Midwest



Powell's story has created very real characters in a vanished world