Overview

Although Edith longs to be a wife, her tiny town has few eligible men. But when soldiers returning from WWI come to work on her family's farm, she meets Milton. They court, marry, and have two daughters, but slowly the horrors he endured while fighting begin to weigh on him. He falls into silence, develops a thousand-yard stare. In the decades that follow, challenged by precarious fortunes and facing down an indifferent government, Edith struggles to build a home for their daughters while fighting for Milton's healing. When They Came Home is a haunting portrait of a marriage tested by war's lingering effects and an example of how even the deepest traumas can be met by the patient powers of love. --Terri Lewis

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9781881163763

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Reviews

When They Came Home moves with the swift voracity of a Jean Echenoz story, threshing the stories of its characters in the way life would have threshed so many in their generation (and so many in our own): through war and poverty, love and madness, devotion and reunion. This is a story of common disaster and uncommon heroism. Edith and Milton cleave to one another as the years collect into decades, as the breath of life distills to a box of artifacts. Terri Lewis puts the first half of the 20th century in your pocket. History, in her telling, grows alive and vibrant. - JOHN COTTER, author of Under the Small Lights and Losing Music An exquisite portrait of a marriage in the years after WWI in small-town America between a shell-shocked young man and a young woman ready to be a devoted and brave wife. A deeply touching story to be treasured and read again. - STEPHANIE COWELL, American Book Award recipient, author of The Man in the Stone Cottage In Lewis' postwar novel, the author draws from her family's history to craft the story of Milton and Edith, and the narrative is both concise and full of detail. Whether depicting the battlefield or the Great Plains, the author excels at setting the scene and describing the emotional connections the characters have to places and to other people . . . A lean, powerful novel about war's psychological aftermath. - KIRKUS REVIEWS The book's progression is both intimate and epic. Edith and Milton come to seem a microcosm of their generation and of the early-twentieth-century US. Their struggles to get help from indifferent government offices, and with a psychologist who tells Milton to suppress his haunting memories, illustrate the enduring and lonely pains of their experiences. A powerful historical novella. - JOSEPH S. PETE, Foreword Reviews (May / June 2026) This novella's strength is its subtlety, its expansiveness, and its rootedness in details that are concrete, particular, and significant. This is a beautiful story, a slow and deliberate take on the ways youth and innocence get warped and sacrificed to harsh reality--whether that be a gregarious young man whose effervescence is warped by warfare or a young woman whose craving for love shows her how much love she has to give. --AMINA GAUTIER, author of The Best That You Can Do and Now We Will Be Happy Final judge, 2025 Miami University Press Novella Prize

Author Information

After a career as a ballet dancer, Terri Lewis focused on writing. She is the author of Behold the Bird in Flight: A Novel of an Abducted Queen, which was named one of the Washington Independent Review of Books' Favorite Books of 2025. Her third novel will be published in March of 2027. She lives in Denver with her husband and two entertaining dogs. To learn more about the author, and to see the family mementos which partially inspired the book, visit terrilewis1.com.

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