A professor's wife named March Murray travels from California to her hometown in Massachusetts to attend the funeral of the woman who helped raise her after her mother died. While there, she becomes passionately involved with her old flame, Hollis, an abandoned child her family took in as a boarder. Now wealthy, Hollis has waited all these years for March to return to him, but she soon discovers that he is no longer the person she once knew, but an evil, heartless man. This "Wuthering Heights" update is set in modern-day New England.

Often, in her soulful novels, Hoffman (Practical Magic, etc.) lets mystical atmospherics-animals that take on superhuman qualities, intense colors and temperatures, minute vibrations in the air that signal ghosts or spirits-do all the work while her characters behave in strange and incredible ways under the influence of forces outside themselves. In this novel, the characters' behavior, while highly emotional, is initially at least traceable to psychological motivation. Unfortunately, Hoffman abandons psychological credibility halfway through, after which her protagonist, March Murray, behaves like an automaton. When March comes back to her childhood home in a small Massachusetts town after 19 years in California, she is swept with longing for Hollis, her former soul mate and lover who ran away in a fit of pique. March waited for him for three years, then married her next-door neighbor, Richard Cooper. When Hollis finally did return, he wed Richard's sister, who has since died. Hollis now determines to win March back, and she can't resist his single-minded pursuit. Hoffman conveys the mesmerizing lure of a lost love with haunting sensuality; but March's excuses for Hollis's violent personality and for his physical abuse of her and her teenaged daughter, Gwen, are well beyond the willed myopia of even obsessive love. Other love affairs between the housekeeper who raised March and the man who was her father's law partner; and between rebellious teenager Gwen (the best character by far, drawn with delightful realism) and March's reclusive brother's son are described with much more insight and plausibility. The high drama of this novel, and Hoffman's assured and lyrical prose, may carry the day for readers who can accept the premise that a passionate obsession can make sweet reason, maternal protectiveness and the instinct for self-preservation fly out the window.

"[D]ark and wonderful....Alice Hoffman has never seen deeper inside her characters....'Here on Earth' is Alice Hoffman's most powerful and moving novel to date, and one of the finest fictional explorations of family love..."     -- Howard Frank Mosher

"At the end of 'Wuthering Heights,' someone viewing the graves of Heathcliff and Catherine wonders how anyone could imagine unquiet slumbers for the lovers resting in that quiet earth. Despite the many wonders that Hoffman has unearthed, you can only wish that she had left them rest in peace."                -- Alix Madrigal

"Daringly old-fashioned, Hoffman's writing is wholesome without being proselytising or dull."        -- Deborah Bosley

"Hoffman's fans won't be disappointed by the airy-fairy 'Here on Earth,' her 12th novel, which weaves all of Hoffman's usual themes into a dreamy, intricate family melodrama, complete with alcoholism, wife-beating, obsessional love and whiffs of murder....Still, this novel's comfy, confident voice is enough to lure you into an armchair for the better part of an evening....It's curiously pleasurable, and reading it induces only a minimum of guilt."           -- Courtney Weaver

In a review of Hoffman’s previous novel, Practical Magic, Booklist wrote, "magic, fantasy, and full-tilt love-at-first-sight have figured in all of Hoffman’s sexy, funny, and endearing novels…in Hoffman’s universe, all boundaries between inner and outer realms are erased. Fear brings whipping winds, a malevolent spirit causes lilac bushes to achieve monstrous proportions, and love turns the air sweet and golden, melts butter, and makes everyone giddy." In Here on Earth, the darker, obsessive side of love is revealed in all of its power, and with all the havoc it wreaks. After nearly twenty years of living in California, March Murray, along with her fifteen-year-old daughter, Gwen, returns to the sleepy Massachusetts town where she grew up to attend the funeral of Judith Dale, the beloved housekeeper who raised her. Yet returning to her hometown also brings her back to Hollis, March’s former soul mate and lover. March’s father had taken the teenaged Hollis, an abandoned child, and the product of a series of detention homes, into his house as a boarder, and treated him like a son. Yet March and Hollis’s passionate love was hardly a normal sibling relationship. When Hollis left her after a petty fight, March waited for him three long years, wondering what she had done wrong. Encountering Hollis again makes March acutely aware of the choices that she has made, and the choices everyone around her has made—including Mrs. Dale, who knew more of love than March could ever have suspected, and her brother Alan, whose tragic history has left him grief-struck, with alcohol as his only solace. Her attraction to Hollis is overwhelming – and March jeopardizes her marriage, her relationship with her daughter and her own happiness in an attempt to reclaim the past. "Hoffman conveys the mesmerizing lure of a lost love with haunting sensuality," Publishers Weekly, said in an advance review and Library Journal said: "Hoffman takes great care here to examine the many facets of love and relationships, turning them like a prism to reflect on March and Hollis." With Here on Earth , Alice Hoffman achieves once again the "iridescent prose, taut narrative suspense and alluring atmosphere" that The Boston Globe cites as her hallmark. Erotic, disturbing and compelling, this is without a doubt Alice Hoffman’s most unforgettable novel.