WATCH: Rebecca Mead and Jia Tolentino on Identity, Nationality, and Inheritance

When she relocated to her birth city, London, with her family in the summer of 2018, New Yorker staff writer Rebecca Mead was both fleeing the political situation in America and seeking to expose her son to a wider world. With a keen sense of what she’d given up as she left New York, her home of 30 years, she tried to knit herself into the fabric of a changed London. In her new book Home/Land, a deft mix of memoir and reportage, Mead draws on literature and art, recent and ancient history, and the experience of encounters with individuals, environments, and landscapes in New York City and in England to explore themes of identity, nationality, and inheritance.

Greenlight Bookstore welcomes Mead, live from London and in conversation with fellow New Yorker staff writer and bestselling author Jia Tolentino, for an evening of contemplating the stark and subtle distances between our selves and the places we hold, or once held, close.

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Founded in October 2009 by Rebecca Fitting and Jessica Stockton Bagnulo, Greenlight Bookstore is an independent bookstore in Brooklyn, New York. Combining the best traditions of the neighborhood bookstore with carefully curated, community-minded events, Greenlight has earned a reputation as a literary destination. Greenlight has continued to serve its community during the COVID-19 pandemic with a diverse array of virtual events, and has been inspired by the movements for racial justice across the country to engage in the work of becoming a more anti-racist company. Learn more at greenlightbookstore.com or check them out @greenlightbklyn.