Endorsements and reviews
This is a book that opens the heart
It moves between cultures and individuals, listening, noting, comparing. It asks profound questions, some of which have surprising answers, some of which have no answers. It invites the reader to walk for a few steps in many other people's shoes, to understand their journeys, to glimpse briefly their experience of home or homelessness, belonging or exile, to touch their joys or miseries. Read more...
The O of Home on BBC's Woman’s Hour
Listen to a whole Woman’s Hour programme inspired by The O of Home. First aired on Monday 5 April 2010, 10:00 on BBC Radio 4
In a special Easter Monday programme, Jane Garvey and guests explore the idea of home.
What is home? What does home mean to you? Is it where you come from or where you are now? Just bricks and mortar or something much more significant? Is it a place of sanctuary? Is it where we all want to be?
Former literary agent Jennifer Kavanagh spent a year asking people what home means to them. The answers are collected in her book The O of Home. Jennifer gave up her house and most of her belongings to travel the world. She now lives in her old office. To her, home is not a place but a state of mind.
www.bbc.co.uk/Womans_Hour
The O of Home made me think and re-examine my own presumptions of home
When I went to Jennifer Kavanagh’s launch of this book at the Quaker Centre I wasn’t sure what to expect. Home – how would I define it? Is it the flat above the Meeting house? Is it a place in the US where I used to live? Is it wherever I am with my family?
I wasn’t surprised that Jennifer had looked at many sides of the question. She had worked with me in Quaker Homeless Action with the street homeless; she had worked with Quaker Social Action with émigrés far from their native lands, struggling to live in our country. But, she surprised me with the depth to which she had gone in exploring the variations on the word and then examining the reverse of the situation. With chapters on our bricks and mortar, our community, our borders and belonging, and our planetary home the book comes full circle: The O of Home.
Jennifer says: ‘In looking at the subject of home, we need to explore not just what it means for us as individuals, but also in the context of our communities, of our nations, and of our species. We need to consider not only what our outer houses mean, but those within.’
For me this led me to realise that if I am not happy in my own skin, I am not happy anywhere. Taking this idea further, outside bricks and mortar might shelter me physically but my soul needs a home as well. Looking at the reverse of what I would consider my home to be – with my husband, near my children – would be out on my own with no fixed abode. Many people live in this way, whether they are street homeless or refugees fleeing from something so scary that they need to leave their own place of safety.
Jennifer says: ‘Home is not static. Home is the balance between security and freedom; of belonging and longing. Home is both an end and a beginning.’
The O of Home made me think and re-examine my own presumptions of home.
Trish Carn, the Friend
Tender and moving book
Home - in the heart, in the head, a physical space that shifts and moves with emotions, a locale, a dream, a site of conflict and cruelty and also intimacy and safety, homelands, exile - all this and more are explored in this tender and moving book which makes you wonder what home really is or ever was.
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, Columnist and author of Settler's Cookbook a memoir
This is a book that opens the heart.
Tender, thought-provoking, compassionate, and insightful, it leads us on a circular journey from understanding what we need and mean by home, through experiences of homelessness and forced displacement, to a true coming home to the self and the divine.
Marian McNaughton, Chair of Trustees of the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust
Stimulates thought on a subject which many take for granted.
There was a time when travelling throughout the world that I felt acute loneliness. I could hardly wait to return to familiar territory. Gradually that feeling diminished and vanished completely after I had spent almost five years in captivity. During my four years of solitary confinement I had to come to terms with my inner life in a new way. Today, I feel at home in virtually any part of the world for I carry 'home' within. There is a great deal of truth in the statement that homelessness is a state of mind although that is not the whole truth of course. It is utterly miserable, and frightening to be without shelter and vulnerable to the world. As Jennifer Kavanagh points out in this book the concept of home means so much more than having an adequate place to live. It is, as she says, 'Where we all want to be'. This book is important reading for anyone who would seek to explore the concept further. It would form an ideal basis for discussion groups or those who are seeking to establish support for the homeless. It does not pretend to contain all the answers but it certainly stimulates thought around a subject which so many of us take for granted.
Terry Waite CBE
Homeward bound for the new year
I wouldn't normally be drawn to books about finding yourself but Jennifer Kavanagh's The O of Home is touching and inspiring in a way that brings to mind Thoreau's Walden.
When I was a publisher at Faber, I used to negotiate contracts with all kinds of literary agents – good and bad, large and small... One of the most civilised and sympathetic was Jennifer Kavanagh...
I never did much business with Jennifer and wasn't surprised to hear in the 1990s that she had sold up, turned her back on the book world and taken to the road, embarking on a year or more of nomadic wandering. A familiar tale, you might think, of someone setting out to find herself in middle age by taking a year off. The dream of leaving is a powerful one, and a surprisingly large number of people turn to it. What's unusual about Jennifer's story is its resolution.
To cut a long story short, Jennifer Kavanagh has just published The O of Home with O Books...In this inspirational memoir, Kavanagh describes how, through joining the Quakers, she has discovered that:
"Home is not just four walls or the country we were born in. It is not a locked door, an investment, a legal address, or a nation with rigid borders. Home is where the heart is: a yearning for a precious past, a dream of something that has never been, or a present reality. Home is in relationship … The qualities of home are reflected in the circle (O), an ancient symbol for safety, equality, inclusiveness and eternity. But we will never be at home unless we are at home to ourselves."
Some people will read this and think "new-age claptrap", but they would be wrong. The O of Home, which reached me just before the turn of the year, is a remarkably honest, unpretentious, clear-eyed account of a courageous woman getting rid of her worldly goods, and a lot of emotional baggage, and finding a new and exhilarating freedom.
There are chapters about old age, death, displacement and homelessness: the whole is knitted together by the author's voyage of self-discovery. In the process of telling her story, Kavanagh also describes the lives of people she has encountered on her wanderings.
This, I cannot stress too strongly, isn't my usual kind of reading, but I was touched by it, and as I began to think about its message – a timely one for the season of good resolutions and fresh starts – my thoughts turned to its antecedents. Kavanagh is writing in the tradition that starts with that American classic Walden by Henry David Thoreau.
The inspiration for Thoreau was much more political and contemporary, and was more fully a protest against aspects of the evolving American republic, but the Quaker side of Kavanagh's book touches Thoreau's ideas at several illuminating points...
It's a nice reminder that inspiration, like comment, is free – and can be liberating.
Robert McCrum, the Guardian blog
N Quentin Woolf
Listen to a Radio interview with Jennifer Kavanagh Click on this link and fast-forward your player to 1hr 24mins.
Read about her at www.blog.nquentinwoolf.com
This book drew me in
It's like a wonderful soup: lots of finely, delicately chopped nutritious ingredients, each retaining their own tang and individuality, yet creating a whole that draws you on to take another mouthful - and another. I marvelled at how, again and again, Jennifer takes us with so few and deft words into someone's life and story.
Douglas Board, Founder of Maslow's Attic Ltd and chair of trustees, Refugee Council
This is the way it is
If 'home' is a theatre of soul, then that which is front-stage in one life, may simply be waiting back-stage or in the wings of another. Jennifer Kavanagh is a good narrator, she takes us to the heart of what matters in so many lives, and I am at home in the audience, listening with so many others, and saying to myself: Oh Yes! Oh Yes! This is the way it is, and, surely together in some way we can help each other to feel more at home in the world.
Lindsay Halton Architect and author of The Secret of Home
Memorable and important book
Home - the longing for it, the loss of it, the need for it - is one of the defining images in a modern world of travel, globalisation and uncertainty. In exploring the many meanings and interpretations of the word, Jennifer Kavanagh has produced a memorable and important book.
Caroline Moorehead, author of Human Cargo