True Home

Good people floating in a morass of bad decisions.

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
Thank you!

So grateful to all who were able to attend. Wonderful evening. And books sold out!

Portland, OR – June 21
7:00 – 8:30p

Thank you Laura Stanfill and all who attended!

Event Info

Santa Monica, CA – July 5
12:00 – 1:00p

Book signing at Barnes & Noble, 1318 3rd St. Promenade.

Store 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

Interview: Nail Your Novel with Roz Morris

“When I stopped working at the business I’d founded, I was a bit lost and I started to write as a way of organizing my life. I wrote every day, what today might be called a journal or a blog, and finally after about a year, I thought I needed to write something and so I started a novel.”

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What readers are saying:

…I appreciate how the author describes the importance of honesty, communication, reasonable goals, searching for growth and self, the importance of family, friends, love, and hope. I highly recommend this memorable novel.

The characters — multi-generational — are flawed but achingly human and relatable, especially 15-year-old Swanee, whose life is about to take a turn. As she experiences the push-pull of her divorcing parents, she struggles to find her own path.

Sympathetic characters with realistic flaws. Or bad people with a possibility of redemption. That’s what most writers of popular fiction aim for, and it’s not an easy balance to strike…

True Home hooked me from page one. It has everything, beginning with a very appealing and convincing cast of multi-generational characters who grapple with love, loss, betrayal, attachment, and understanding….Clare’s straightforward yet luminous prose, while pulling no punches, brims with insight and compassion…

I absolutely loved this character-driven, deeply human story. This was a wonderfully and intricately written novel about the human spirit – what it means for us to be connected and belonging to each other and the world.

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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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