Victoria Glendinning

Where the Hearth Is

The Making of Home

By

Atlantic Books 346pp £20 order from our bookshop

What does ‘home’ mean? Home is ‘a state of being, as well as the place where one lives or one’s place of origin’, writes Judith Flanders. The peoples of northwest Europe all have words that distinguish between ‘house’ and ‘home’. Southern Europeans do not. They have no words for ‘home’ (it may just have something to do with the weather). Judith Flanders’s book is about the ‘home’ countries – mainly England and Holland, with forays into France, Germany and the United States – from the Middle Ages onwards.

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