A Literary Prescription for

Homesickness

For the ache of being far from where you belong.

Homesickness is one of the oldest human feelings and one of the least respected. We treat it as something children grow out of, when in truth it can arrive at any age: on a first night away, in a new country, in a life that no longer looks like the one you left. It is not weakness. It is love pointed at a place, and at the people and the version of yourself that place still holds. These books and poems keep company with that longing, and gently remind you that home is something you can carry with you.

Books Poetry Quotes & Prose

Books

Prescribed reading

Some of these are novels of leaving and belonging, following people caught between an old home and a new one, and some are true accounts of exile and return. Fiction and non-fiction together, they all understand that missing a place is a serious feeling, and that the journey home, when it comes, is rarely simple.

The Namesake

Jhumpa Lahiri · 2003

Lahiri’s tender novel follows a family who leave Calcutta for America, and a son caught between the home his parents grieve and the one he was born into. It is homesickness seen from both sides of a generation: the ache of those who left, and the quieter dislocation of those who never quite belong anywhere. Beautifully observed, and deeply consoling for anyone living between two places.

“Try to remember it always, he said once to Gogol… remember that you and I made this journey together.”

Americanah

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie · 2013

Adichie’s heroine leaves Nigeria for America, builds a life there, and finds herself homesick in a way she cannot quite explain even to herself, until she decides to go back. It is sharp, funny and honest about what you gain and lose by leaving, and about the strange discovery that home may have changed as much as you have. A rich, absorbing companion for anyone far from where they started.

The Return

Hisham Matar · 2016

Matar returns to Libya in search of the truth about his father, who vanished under the old regime, and writes about homeland, exile and loss with extraordinary grace. It is non-fiction, and it is unforgettable: a meditation on what it means to belong to a place you cannot safely return to, and on the pull of home even when home has become dangerous ground.

The Odyssey

Homer · c. 8th century BC

The original story of homesickness. Odysseus spends ten years trying to get home to Ithaca, and every trial along the way is really about the pull of the place and the people he left. Three thousand years on, it still says the essential thing: that the longing for home can outlast almost anything, and that the journey back is a story worth telling. Try Emily Wilson’s clear, modern translation.

Notes from a Small Island

Bill Bryson · 1995

Before leaving Britain after twenty years, Bryson took a farewell tour of it, and wrote this affectionate, very funny love letter to a country and its peculiarities. It is a book about the deep, comic fondness we develop for a place we have made home, and it is perfect for anyone missing somewhere ordinary and beloved. Homesickness, it turns out, is often for the small things.

The Art of Travel

Alain de Botton · 2002

De Botton thinks about why we leave home, what we are really looking for when we go, and why the places we long for rarely match the places we find. It is gentle, philosophical non-fiction that quietly reframes homesickness: not as a problem to solve, but as part of the strange, restless business of belonging somewhere at all. A thoughtful companion for anyone between here and there.

Poems about homesickness

For the pull of home

“Home Thoughts, from Abroad”

Robert Browning, 1845

Oh, to be in England
Now that April’s there,
And whoever wakes in England
Sees, some morning, unaware,
That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf
Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf.

Browning wrote this while living in Italy, homesick for an English spring he could picture perfectly and not see. That is homesickness exactly: the ordinary details of a place, the leaves, the birds, made almost unbearably vivid by distance. He does not mourn grand things. He misses the elm and the dew, which is how it always goes.

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“The Old Familiar Faces”

Charles Lamb, 1798

I have had playmates, I have had companions,
In my days of childhood, in my joyful school-days—
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.

Lamb reminds us that homesickness is often less about a place than about the people who made it home. His refrain, all gone, the old familiar faces, is the quiet grief underneath any longing for the past: that home was made of people, and people move on, and you cannot go back to a house and find them still there.

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“Home, Sweet Home”

John Howard Payne, 1823

Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam,
Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home;
A charm from the sky seems to hallow us there,
Which, seek through the world, is ne’er met with elsewhere.

Payne wrote the most famous line about home while himself far from one, often broke and wandering. That is the ache in it: he knew perfectly well that no palace could replace the humble place he came from, and knew it because he no longer had it. The most quoted words on home were written by a homesick man.

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“The Soldier”

Rupert Brooke, 1914

If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England.
…A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam.

Brooke, far from home and facing death in a war, carries his country inside him so completely that even a foreign grave would be a piece of England. It is homesickness turned into devotion. Whatever you make of its patriotism, it captures the way a place can become so much a part of you that you take it everywhere, even to the end.

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Quotes & Prose

Quotes about homesickness to keep

Home is where the heart is.

Pliny the Elder

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Where thou art, that is home.

Emily Dickinson

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He is happiest, be he king or peasant, who finds peace in his home.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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The magic thing about home is that it feels good to leave, and it feels even better to come back.

Wendy Wunder

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Home is not a place, it is a feeling that we carry within us wherever we go.

Cecelia Ahern

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From Georgia

Carrying home with you

A practice for finding steadiness wherever you are, and an essay on learning to belong to the life in front of you.

Find Your Inner Invincible Summer

Guided meditation by Georgia Clare

A grounding practice for the days you feel far from home. A way of finding the warm, settled place that travels with you.

Listen Now For Free

Learning to Belong to the Life You Have

Personal essay by Georgia Clare · The Library

On the ache of missing another place or time, and how I slowly came to feel at home in the ordinary life that was actually mine.

Read the Essay →

The 21-Day Meditation Course

Guided Meditation Course · Georgia Clare

Three weeks of short, guided meditations to help you build a calm, steady daily practice, one day at a time.

Start the 21-Day Course →

Questions people ask

Reading for Homesickness

Where should I start?

If you only read one thing, start with The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri. It is a quiet, beautiful novel about belonging to two places and fully to neither, which is the heart of homesickness for so many people. And if a whole book feels like too much today, scroll to the poems below. Charles Lamb’s “The Old Familiar Faces” says the ache in a single page.

What can I read when I am far from home and missing it?

Something that turns the longing into company. Americanah follows that exact feeling across continents, and The Return is a real account of going back to a homeland after long exile. Or begin with the poems and the lines to keep further down the page. You do not have to read them in order.

Which quotes about home and homesickness are worth keeping?

Quotes worth keeping include “There is nothing dearer to a man than his own country.” (Homer), “Home is where the heart is.” (Pliny the Elder) and “What is that feeling of home but the memory of the people who made us?” You will find these and more in the quotes section above.

Can reading really help with homesickness?

It genuinely can. Homesickness is a lonely feeling, partly because it can seem childish to admit. Reading writers who have missed a place so much it hurt, and named it exactly, quietly tells you the ache is real and shared. And stories of leaving and returning remind you that home is something you carry, not only somewhere you left.

Homesickness

Prescribed reading

For the pull of home

Quotes about homesickness to keep

Carrying home with you

Reading for Homesickness

Where should I start?

What can I read when I am far from home and missing it?

Which quotes about home and homesickness are worth keeping?

Can reading really help with homesickness?

More prescriptions await.