Housebound

“Here, secrets crisscross through walls as through hours, and words travel in creepy, kind whispers . . . Grown children run through the woods and enter strange houses. They live over here and over there—all over the terrible and beautiful map.”—Kate Bernheimer, judge for the 2011–12 Madeleine P. Plonsker Emerging Writer’s Residency Prize

“Every important novel explores the tension between our inner lives and the outside world, but Elizabeth Gentry’s Housebound does so in a way so profound and unsettling that the reader sometimes feels trapped between the two. Housebound traffics in the liminal, in the recesses of consciousness, in mystery and in manners, yet it appeals to the heart as well as the head . . . Nothing like this dark fairy tale of discovery and desire has yet been written.”—Michael Parker, author of The Watery Part of the World