Novels that Rewrite Our Relationship to Homes and Houses

Rachel Pastan is the author of We’re So Lucky to Live Here, about a young theater director who tries to raise enough money to keep her childhood home by staging a production of The Cherry Orchard in the turret house. It’s out September 15th from Delphinium. Below, she recommends three novels about alternative living arrangements. (photo credit: Andy Shelter)

When I think about stories with grand houses, Anton Chekhov’s play The Cherry Orchard—written over 100 years ago about a bunch of people trying haplessly to hang on to their beloved home—comes to mind first. I love stories that plop me down into interesting buildings, reconsider the many different ways of living in them, and explore the risk of losing cherished homes. Three more recent additions to the shelf explore what might happen when we give up conventional housing aspirations and invent new relationships to homes, and to each other.

Wolf Bells by Leni Zumas

Two old friends—former bandmates in a punk band—try to hang on to the big, falling apart house on a cliff high over the Pacific one of them inherited. Their plan: turn it into a place where older people, in need of care, live together with younger ones who share the caregiving. It’s a radical, beautiful, sometimes hilarious idea, and all kinds of unexpected things come of it, both lovely and hard. And the chapters are named after the rooms where they take place: dining room, back porch, downstairs bathroom!

The Turner House by Angela Flournoy

The house in East Detroit where the thirteen Turner children grew up is both a beloved link to the family’s past and an unmanageable burden. The mortgage now costs more than the house is worth. When the mother, Viola, can no longer live on her own, her children must decide how to care for her and what to do about the house, which may or may not be literally haunted, but is certainly suffused with love, grief, and also hope.

Dwelling by Emily Hunt Kivel

This odd, funny book begins with a thought experiment: What if every renter in New York City were evicted in a single day? A young woman named Evie finds herself in a strange town full of unlikely houses metastasized with wild additions and eventually moves into a building shaped like a shoe. She turns out to have mad cobblering skills! With a touch of fantasy and a sharp eye for the absurd, the novel offers a surprising happily ever after.