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 ZumasTwo 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 car...