True Home

Good people floating in a morass of bad decisions.

Available May 20, 2025

True Home

Swanee Burrows, the restless, edgy fifteen-year-old daughter of a scandal-ridden congressman and a beautifully flawed mother, has a penchant for running away: from her boarding school, her parents, her sometime-boyfriend, and herself. A coming of age of both adults and adolescents, True Home, set in a rainswept Pacific Northwest town where good people float in a morass of bad decisions, is a story of interwoven families, teenage angst, deception, and class, where love and betrayal collide, and escape proves deadly.

Published by Vine Leaves Press.

“With a lovely, clear-eyed precision as startling as it is rare, True Home tells the story of a family in crisis and their runaway daughter, to devastating effect. As I read it, I found myself thinking of some of the great domestic dramas of the late American Century: Scott Spencer’s Endless Love, Judith Guest’s Ordinary People, the sort of novels whose piercing emotional valences few writers seem able to reach anymore. Only now–Janet Clare, wonderfully, has.”
Matthew SpecktorAuthor, The Golden Hour & Always Crashing
“Full of intrigue and delivered in deft prose, Janet Clare’s True Home employs a sizable and dynamic cast to explore the nuances of marriage, identity, and ultimately, redemption.”
Jonathan Evison NY Times Bestselling Author, The Heart of Winter
“This story of intertwined family dramas, True Home is a propulsive powerhouse of empathy. Flawed as her characters may be, it’s obvious how much Clare loves them — and you will, too.”
J. Ryan Stradal NY Times Bestselling Author, Saturday Night at the Lakeside Supper Club
“Clare’s page-turning newest is about the people, the places, the scandals, and the deep emotions we desperately try to escape. Set against the crystalline beauty of the Pacific Northwest, and featuring a feisty fifteen-year-old daughter who has made a habit of running away, this coming-of-age novel is really a coming-to-the-truth story, navigating class, betrayal and yes, love, too. True Home is true brilliance.”
Caroline LeavittNY Times Bestselling Author, Days of Wonder
“I love a good mother-daughter-father intrigue, rife with class issues and devastating secrets! Janet Clare expertly mines the confounding push-pull of family connection in True Home. Clare is a master at articulating the emotional riptides running under relationships. In True Home, daring to really love might pose the greatest danger of all.”
Samantha DunnJournalist/Author, Failing Paris
True Home is a novel about how our current relationships are informed, challenged by, and even improved by meaningful relationships from our past. Janet Clare’s smart and finely observed novel kept me guessing where the characters would end up–and who they’d end up with. I loved it.
Christina ClancyAuthor, Snowbirds
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Mini Book Tour for True Home

Launch – Culver City, CA – Sunday, May 25th
5:00 – 6:00p

In conversation with Samantha Dunn, journalist & author of Failing Paris and Not By Accident.
Village Well Bookstore, Culver City, CA (424) 298-8951
9900 Culver Blvd #1b

Eventbrite Reservation

Portland, OR – June 21
7:00 – 8:30p

In conversation with Laura Stanfill, author of the writer’s guide Imagine A Door.
Bold Coffee & Books, 1755 SW Jefferson St. (971) 888-5673

Event Info

“Finding Home” Santa Monica, CA – July 17
6:00 – 8:00p

Four local authors discuss what it means to “find home.” Reading, discussion, and Q&A with social gathering to follow.
Santa Monica Public Library 601 Santa Monica Blvd. (310) 458-8600

Event Info

West Hollywood, CA – July 28
7:00 – 8:00p

In conversion with J Ryan Stradal, author of Saturday Night At the Lakeside Country Club. 
Book Soup 8818 Sunset Blvd. (310) 659-3110

Event Info

A Short Reading

“It was as if a swarm of locusts with moving trucks had descended and eaten away at their home.”

Vine Leaves Press Hosted Reading – August 2024

Janet Clare

About The Author

Janet Clare has had short stories and essays published online and anthologized. Her novel, Time Is the Longest Distance was published in 2018. True Home is her second novel. She lives in Los Angeles.

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Also by Janet Clare

Time is the Longest Distance

Lilly, a 45 year old New Yorker, travels to Australia in search of the father she never knew after her widowed mother confesses to an affair.

“How could you not love a novel set against the Australian outback? About fierce love, endless longing, ravenous desire, and the secrets that derail us and ruin others.  A phenomenally moving experience (it’s so much more than a novel), Clare’s debut shows a complex web of relationships that shifts as much as a desert itself—and is just as gorgeous.”

– Caroline Leavitt –

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