After decades of living in Brooklyn, Pearline, the protagonist of Donna Hemans’ The House of Plain Truth, returns to Jamaica to nurse her father through his final days and reclaim her childhood home. Instead, she finds herself at odds with her sisters who view her as an outsider. On his deathbed, her father tasks her with solving the mystery of what happened to the children he was forced to abandon in Cuba while working as a migrant laborer sixty years before. With lyrical, contemplative prose and subtle revelations, The House of Plain Truth deftly unravels the economic and political pressures that complicate a woman s conception of home.