Dreaming Home – queer novel follows six characters across forty years, exploring trauma, betrayal, and the search for home

Dreaming Home is a novel in stories, set between Dallas, San Francisco, and Fort Lauderdale. It’s a queer coming-of-age, and coming-to-terms exploration, that follows the after-effects of betrayal and poignantly explores the ways we search for home.

Following six characters across forty years, the novel recounts the fragmentation of a family. Kyle runs from his family–and the conversion therapy program they enrolled him in–to the west coast in search of queer community. He lands in San Francisco in the eighties and, scrambling to his feet, begins practicing architecture. Though his extravagant mother isn’t far behind, and her presence alters Kyle’s life, and relationships, for decades to come.

Trauma is not an event, but an atmosphere. Characters carry it with them wherever they go. It is a rich, subtle exploration of the way trauma moves between generations, and marks our personalities. The fragmentary nature of the text asks the reader to engage deeply with the familial losses at the centre of of .

When a sister’s casual act of betrayal awakens their father’s demons—ones spawned by his time in Vietnamese POW camps—the effects of the ensuing violence against her brother ripple out over the course of forty years, from Lubbock, to San Francisco, to Fort Lauderdale. Swept up in this arc, the members of this family and their loved ones tell their tales. It’s a poignant exploration of all the ways we search for home, and the unforgettable story of the fragmenting of an American family.

Available from Biblioasis

Lucian Childs has been a Peter Taylor Fellow at the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop. He is a co-editor of Lambda Literary finalist Building Fires in the Snow: A Collection of Alaska LGBTQ Short Fiction and Poetry. Born in Dallas, Texas, he has lived in Toronto, Ontario, for fifteen years, since 2015 on a permanent basis.