Dream House

A revolutionary memoir about domestic abuse by the award-winning author of Her Body and Other Parties. In the Dream House is Carmen Maria Machado's engrossing and wildly innovative account of a relationship gone bad, and a bold dissection of the mechanisms and cultural representations of psychological abuse. Tracing the full arc of a harrowing relationship with a charismatic but volatile woman, Machado struggles to make sense of how what happened to her shaped the person she was becoming. And it's that struggle that gives the book its original structure: each chapter is driven by its own narrative trope--haunted houses, erotica, bildungsroman--in which Machado holds the events up to the light and examines them from different angles. She looks back at her religious adolescence, unpacks the stereotype of lesbian relationships as safe and utopian, and widens the view with essayistic explorations about the history and reality of abuse in queer relationships. Machado's dire narrative is leavened with her characteristic wit, playfulness, and openness to inquiry. She casts a critical eye over legal proceedings, Star Trek and Disney villains, fairy tales, as well as iconic works of film and fiction. The result is a wrenching, riveting book that explodes our ideas about what a memoir can do and be.

A young woman's dream house quickly becomes a nightmare.

A farmhouse is being reproduced a dozen times, with slight variations, throughout a valley. Three small graves have been dug in the front garden, the middle one lying empty. A woman in a wheelchair sorts through boxes while her husband clambers around the old demolished buildings, wondering where the animals have gone. A young woman – called ‘the barren one’ behind her back – dreams of love, while an ageing headmaster contemplates the end of his life. At the entrance to the long dirt driveway, a car appears and pauses – pointed towards the house like a silver bullet, ticking with heat. So begins The Dream House, Craig Higginson’s riveting and unforgettable novel set in the Midlands of KwaZulu-Natal. Written with dark wit, a stark poetic style and extraordinary tenderness, this is a story about the state of a nation and a deep meditation on memory, ageing, meaning, family, love and loss. This updated 2016 edition contains new content, with Craig Higginson exploring the background to The Dream House, his varied experiences in a farmhouse in KwaZulu-Natal and the subsequent and poignant motivations for this moving novel.

This Pulitzer Prize-winning play is now a major motion picture.

Pre-order the brand new Rachel Hore novel, The Hidden Years, coming soon. From the million-copy Sunday Times bestseller comes a gripping and moving story about one woman's move to the house of her dreams. Everyone has a dream of their perfect house - in the heart of the countryside, or perhaps a stately residence in the middle of a wonderful city? For Kate Hutchinson, the move to Suffolk from the tiny, noisy London terrace she shares with her husband Simon and their two young children was almost enough to make her dreams come true. Space, peace, a measured, rural pace of life have a far greater pull for Kate than the constantly overflowing in-tray on her desk at work. Moving in with her mother-in-law must surely be only a temporary measure before the estate agent's details of the perfect house fall through the letterbox. But when Kate, out walking one evening, stumbles upon the house of her dreams, a beautiful place, full of memories, it is tantalizingly out of her reach. Its owner is the frail elderly Agnes, whose story - as it unravels - echoes so much of Kate's own. And Kate comes to realize how uncertain and unsettling even a life built on dreams can be - wherever you are, at whatever time you are living and whoever you are with. Praise for Rachel Hore's novels: ‘A tour de force. Rachel's Paris is rich, romantic, exotic and mysterious’ JUDY FINNIGAN ‘An elegiac tale of wartime love and secrets’ Telegraph ‘A richly emotional story, suspenseful and romantic, but unflinching in its portrayal of the dreadful reality and legacy of war’ Book of the Week, Sunday Mirror 'Pitched perfectly for a holiday read' Guardian 'Engrossing, pleasantly surprising and throughly readable' SANTA MONTEFIORE 'A beautifully written and magical novel about life, love and family' CATHY KELLY

In this “vividly written” novel, an architect returns to her childhood home on the coast of Maine—where startling family secrets come out of the woodwork (Kirkus). Gina Gilbert has designed an ideal life for herself in San Francisco. But when a car accident takes her parents’ lives, she finds herself drawn back to the New England home where she was raised. Facing grief and painful memories of the past, Gina turn to her skills as an architect—dissecting her old home, and the generations of secrets it conceals. The Gilbert family’s story unfolds room by room: from the darkroom where Gina’s gentle but passive father ran his photography business to the kitchen where her volatile mother toiled under the weight of dashed dreams. But when Gina and her sister Cassie discover that a trove of historically significant letters have gone missing, long-buried truths are revealed, and family myths begin to unravel. To find the healing she needs, Gina must search the recesses of her heart, and reawaken her understanding of what makes a house a home.

Famous for its transparency, the Philip Johnson Glass House--the icon of modernism that Vincent Scully called "the most conceptually important house of the century"--has nonetheless proven vexingly opaque to interpretation. Its architect, Philip Cortelyou Johnson, has been equally elusive, a polarizing and influential cultural figure on whom no psychological character study yet exists. In her new book, Adele Tutter addresses both enigmas. Dream House: An Intimate Portrait of the Philip Johnson Glass House reveals how this superficially nonrepresentational physical structure encodes aspects of its architect's aspirations, motivations, and conflicts--how it acts as a veritable self-portrait of his inner world. An envious, vulnerable man emerges from this intimate synthesis. Fearing he lacked talent or genius and possessing a character prone to fragmentation, Johnson perpetually searched for a dominating mentor or style to bolster his sense of self and help organize his chaotic inner world, while concealing the forbidden sense of greatness with which he justified his desire for power and influence. Tutter's analysis reconciles the contradictory forces in a man who was both a one-time advocate of Hitler and a humanist homosexual, a dogmatic modernist and an errant postmodernist.Through its rigorous, radical reappraisal of the Glass House, this book paints a fresh and psychologically revealing portrait of the man who built it.

“The perfect haunted house story for these unnerving times.” —New York Times Dream House, the riveting debut novel from Pushcart Prize-winning author Valerie Laken, tells the story of one troubled house—the site of a domestic drama that will forever change the lives of two families. Embracing volatile issues such as race, class, and gentrification, while seamlessly mixing genres as diverse as crime fiction, suspense, and home renovation, Dream House is a “sexy, sharp-eyed, deeply haunted, [and] wonderful book.” (Charles Baxter, author of the National Book Award finalist The Feast of Love)