“Rush Home Road, the story of a 70-year-old woman‘s journey through the nearly unbearable sorrows of her past, in order to save an abandoned little girl, is a first novel of exquisite power, honesty, and conviction. Its portrait of how much has changed, and how little, over nearly a century, in the realms of race, love, hate, and loss, is quite nearly without flaws.”
— JACQUELYN MITCHARD, author of The Deep End of the Ocean and
A Theory of Relativity

“The story‘s beauty is in its simplicity. Told coldly, without pretension, it reveals Lansens as an honest writer with a convincing knowledge of her characters and chosen period. She takes racism, love, hate, violence, and forgiveness in her stride.”
— SUNDAY EXPRESS, UK

“A poignant novel about the power of love and forgiveness.”
— BOOKLIST

“To read Lansens‘ Rush Home Road is to read Alice Munro‘s Lives of Girls and Women coupled with Margaret Laurence‘s The Stone Angel, but as if both novels had been penned by Toni Morrison…. Lansens is a brilliant talent, with a profound, big-hearted comprehension of human flaws and humane possibilities.”
— THE GLOBE AND MAIL

“Those two people [Addy and Sharla] are powerful creations who will grab even reluctant readers and hold them until the end, showing that you not only can go home again but you can also go triumphant." 
— NASHVILLE CITY PAPER

“A book with the power to captivate.”
— THE IRISH TATLER

“A stunning debut novel.”
— SUNDAY EXPRESS, UK

 "Brilliant in its microscopic portrayal of the scent and stench, tears and screams of black Canadian life in a small southern Ontario town; but not forgetting to show how laughter and joy played a dramatic role in the fabric of life there for former slaves, Rush Home Road draws with graphic pulsating prose the picture of life in the developing ‘Negro‘ societies formed by the proliferation of Canadian stations of the Underground Railway. Rush Home Road takes you back to face the breath-stopping tragedy of Canadian racialism. But the inherent strength of black life and black culture prevails through the novel‘s unremitting realism.”
— AUSTIN CLARKE, Giller Prize-winning author of The Polished Hoe

“In Rush Home Road, Lori Lansens creates a teeming, forgotten world linked to our own by one woman‘s life, laid down across the twentieth century like a fragile railroad track.”
— THE VANCOUVER SUN

“Rush Home Road is a major triumph…. Dickens has written some stuff like this; so have Alice Munro and Raymond Carver, Haruki Murakami and Penelope Fitzgerald, Rohinton Mistry and Robertson Davies. But not on their first try.”
— THE HAMILTON SPECTATOR

“Lansens interweaves the past and present cinematically, with both narrative lines holding the reader rapt. Rush Home Road is a compulsively readable book that leaves us feeling we know more about a time and a place-and about humankind-than when we opened the cover.”
— QUILL AND QUIRE