Interviews & Reviews of Still Come Home

"Five stars. Kudos to Katey Schultz for creating a fine literary experience." Read the full write-up & interview here.

"[Schultz's] work serves the highest calling in a heartless world: to create opportunities for empathy, and for reflection...Through her fiction, Schultz has not only successfully captured the cultural landscape of Afghanistan in 2009, but the on-going equation of American involvement in Afghanistan. And she's packaged it in an easily accessible form, without judgment. Not, however, without hope." Read the full review here.

"Taut, moving, explosive, gut-wrenching - this is simply one helluva read..." Read the full review here.

"Still Come Home is a novel in which hope and hopelessness live side-by-side in unequal measure." Read the full review here.

"[Schultz's] novel’s narrative lays bare timeless dilemmas—desperation, loyalty, the sticky demands of love—but the situations her main characters find themselves in are so thoroughly modern, the focus so timely, relevant, and startling that it opened me up, as a reader and human..." Read the full review here.

"[Schultz] soaks her writing in such detail that even the smallest narrative observations evoke emotional weight." Full article here.

Hear the story behind the story of Still Come Home, including how Katey taught herself to "write long" and what prompted her to write a novel in the first place. Great inside scoop info for writers and readers alike! Listen to the full interview on Interlochen Public Radio's "Michigan Writers on Air"

Katey stops by Asheville's Wordplay and reads aloud from her new novel, Still Come Home. Listen to the full interview and novel excerpt here.

Favorite authors that Katey draws inspiration from and what fuels her as a writer. Read the full review here.

"Maybe you think you don’t want to read a novel about war in the Middle East. Perhaps Afghanistan is the last place you think you want to envision with your mind’s eye. It’s too alien, too faraway, too nightmarish. What I’m telling you is that those 'reasons' count for nothing. It is not only the American soldier and his wife back home with whom you will feel kinship but also with Aaseya (from the book’s very first page), Rahim, and Ghazél, and this story will bring home to you the truth of universal humanity like nothing else I’ve read for a long time."

“We see each character affected by their setting and yet there’s always hope, whether we find in within a wife overseas or with a lost little boy. They all are experiencing the same topics: loss, love, identity. [Schultz has] taken such a rock of a topic, heavy and seemingly unmoving, and grabbed it, molded it, and presented it with delicate edges.” Full review here.

"It’s a shame that in the decades since the end of the Vietnam War, wars are still taking place for people to write about. On the other hand, it’s a blessing that we have novelists like Katey Schultz to tell stories of those wars in an enlightened and empathic manner."

"Schultz’s authorial balance is realistic, tough, painstakingly researched, steeped in the knowledge that the world is unfair. Her writing style is supremely attentive, and it’s this attention that may be the great gift of writing and novels: not a trick-like verisimilitude or trompe l’oeil but a careful asking of questions. What would happen now; how would this person feel now?" Read full review here.

"Showcasing a genuine literary talent in the form of an inherently reader engaging narrative storytelling style, author Katey Schultz's deftly scripted novel Still Come Home is especially and unreservedly recommended for both community and academic library Contemporary Literary Fiction collections." Read the full review here. 

"What a satisfying and haunting reading experience Katey Schultz provides in her new novel. Still Come Home is set in Afghanistan and takes the reader into the experience of four main characters, each of whom negotiates the terror and loss of that endless conflict. Summing up the harsh landscape and the muddle of that war, one character observes, 'The only way to win is to survive.'" Read the full review here. 

"Schultz excels at physical description, is alert to psychological and social nuance, and plausibly devises a plot that masks its intentions and turns until the final scenes...Still Come Home joins a tidy library of well-turned novels by Americans about war in Afghanistan that combine interest in US military personnel and the Afghans with whom they interact: Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya’s The Watch, Elliot Ackerman’s Green on Blue, and Ray McPadden’s And the Whole Mountain Burned, for starters, and we might include British-Pakistani author Nadeem Aslam’s novels The Wasted Vigil and The Blind Man’s Garden, too." Read the full review here.