
Books by Janet Clare



True Home
The idea of home can be ambiguous: teenagers thinking of escape, adults who long to cling to it. Is it the house, however grand or modest, or the people within and without, that make it True Home?
Colin McGill, a sportswriter, is happily married with three children. When an affair threatens his marriage, he manages to makes it worse as his wife compounds their misery. Meanwhile, Colin’s ex— who is divorcing her second husband, a scandal ridden congressman— calls on Colin for advice, and her teenage daughter, Swanee, runs away. True Home contains multitudes: including a high school basketball prodigy, a Russian dancer, fire at an organic Hawaiian farm, and adults like acting kids, kids professing to be adults. What could possibly go wrong?

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.
Arriving in Melbourne, Lilly meets her half-brother, Grant, a desirable platypus professor, and his twenty-something daughter, Jen. Together, they provide fair warning for Lilly about her father, Cameron, a cankerous rogue and legendary explorer.
The meeting doesn’t go well and Lilly storms out thinking she’s made a big mistake. But Cameron manages a half-hearted apology and challenges her to take the same trip her mother made with him on the Canning Stock Route, one the roughest outback tracks in the country. Lilly can’t imagine Ida, a beige-haired, meticulous, and spiritually selfish woman, going on such an adventure, and, along with the revelation itself, serves to upend any notion of just who her mother is, and acknowledging it wasn’t only Lilly’s father who was unknown to her.
Grant refuses to let Lilly to go it alone with Cameron, and he and Jen, alternately bored and preoccupied with looking good, come along for the journey. The hard days and nights in the harsh desert provide time and space for Lilly to recall the years with her ex-husband, Stephen, artist and all around drunk, perhaps the great love and surely the great disappointment of her life.
Enveloped in sand and dust, Lilly faces the real power and destructiveness of secrets, of sexual taboos and the thrill of transgression. In this place where deception is as inevitable as death that comes not just as an ending, but as a lesson in the naivete of thinking any of us are ever exactly where we belong in the world.