Labour Day is a warm-hearted novel by the writer best known for At Home in the World, the memoir of her life and affair with reclusive author J.D. Salinger.

Labour Day is set in 1987 and narrated by 13-year-old Henry, a boy who feels ill at ease with his place in the world as a result of his parents’ divorce and his changing body and desires. Henry is an outsider at school and in his father’s new family, but from this status comes his keen powers of observation and sensitivity to changes in mood and feeling. While buying school supplies with his mother in a department store, Henry is approached by an older man, Frank, who is injured and needs their assistance. Frank becomes an integral part of their lives over a short period of time. Frank’s story emerges gradually and Henry and his mother are equally transfixed by him.