Housemates
A Novel
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- Pre-Order
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- Expected May 28, 2024
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- $13.99
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- Pre-Order
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
Two young housemates embark on a road trip to discover themselves in this sparkling novel of love, friendship, and chosen family in a fractured America, by the award-winning author of The Third Rainbow Girl
“A wise, beautiful, and gorgeously gay exploration of America, art, and the rugged, vast country that is love itself.”—Sarah Thankam Mathews, author of All This Could Be Different
A Most Anticipated Book of 2024: Lit Hub, Debutiful, LGBTQ Reads, The Rumpus, Lilith, Hey Alma, Them
What does it feel like, standing in the moments that will mark your life?
When Bernie replies to Leah’s ad for a new housemate in Philadelphia, the two begin an intense and defiantly uncategorizable friendship based on a mutual belief in their art, and one another. Both aspire to capture the world around them: Leah through her writing; Bernie through her photography.
After Bernie’s former photography professor, the renowned yet tarnished Daniel Dunn, dies and leaves her a complicated inheritance, Leah volunteers to accompany Bernie to his home in rural Pennsylvania, turning the jaunt into a road trip with an ambitious mission: to document America through words and photographs.
What ensues is a journey into the heart of the nation, bringing the housemates into conversation with people from all walks of life—“the absurd dreamers and failures of this wide, wide country”— as they try to make sense of the times they are living in. Along the way, Leah and Bernie discover what it means to chase their own ideas and dreams, and to embrace what they are capable of both romantically and artistically.
Warm and insightful, Housemates is a story of youth and freedom—a glorious celebration of queer life, and how art and love might save us all.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Two queer artists explore pastoral Pennsylvania in the sumptuous if rambling latest from Eisenberg (The Third Rainbow Girl). Things kick off when Bernie Abbott, a barista and photographer, moves into a house in Philadelphia with four roommates including Leah McCausland, a media studies PhD candidate who is nonbinary. She befriends Leah and is turned on by the sounds of her sexual escapades through a shared wall. When Bernie learns her old professor, the late photographer Daniel Dunn, has bequeathed her his old cameras, plates, and negatives, she wants to reject the offer—Dunn was accused of sexual assault—but Leah changes her mind: "He's dead.... The slate is wiped blank." Then Leah receives a grant from her program and enlists Bernie's collaboration on a vaguely sketched project ("I just want to drive around and look at things and I'd write things down and you'd photograph them"). Bernie's mission to pick up Dunn's belongings at his home in rural Mifflin County gives the pair a destination. En route, they encounter rebellious cigarette-smoking Amish teens outside a country buffet and smarmy men lurking around their motel, and their partnership becomes not just creative but romantic. The story starts at a crawl, but once Eisenberg revs the engine, she reaches luminous heights. Readers will count themselves lucky to go along for the ride.