Wednesday, June 17, 2015 at 1:00 p.m. in the JFK Institute Library 

Hosted by the Department of Culture (Dr. Alexander Starre) and the Library of the JFKI

About Home Leave (2014):

Chris Kriegstein is a man on the move, with a career that takes his family across North America, Europe, and Asia. For his wife, Elise, the hardship of chronic relocation is soothed by the allure of reinvention. Over the years, Elise shape-shifts: once a secretive Southern Baptist, she finds herself becoming a seasoned expat in Shanghai, an unapologetic adulterer in Thailand, and, finally, a renowned interior decorator in Madison with a knack for intuiting her clients’ own journeys. But it’s the Kriegstein children, Leah and Sophie, who face the most tumult.  Fiercely protective of each other–but also fiercely competitive–the two sisters long for stability, for normalcy in an ever-changing environment.

When the family suffers an unimaginable loss, they can’t help but wonder: Was it meant to be, or did one decision change their lives forever? And what does it mean when home is everywhere and nowhere at the same time? With humor and heart, Brittani Sonnenberg chases this wildly loveable family through the excitement and worry of their adventures around the world, and investigates the terrible and exquisite endurance of human attachment to people and place.

About the author:

Brittani Sonnenberg has an MFA from the University of Michigan and lives in Berlin, where she is a frequent contributor to Berlin Stories on NPR. She also serves as a visiting lecturer at the MFA program of the University of Hong Kong. Her award-winning fiction has been widely published in magazines such as Ploughshares, anthologized in the O’Henry Short Story Prize Series, and received distinguished story recognition by Best American Short Stories. Her non-fiction has been published by Time Magazine, the Hairpin, the Associated Press, NPR, Minneapolis Star Tribune, and elsewhere. She studied English literature with a citation in Mandarin Chinese at Harvard University. She was a European Journalism Fellow at Berlin’s Freie Universität from 2009-2010 and served as the editor of the American Academy’s Berlin Journal from 2011-2013.  Home Leave is her first novel.