Rebecca Makkai reads from "The Hundred-Year House"

The acclaimed author of The Borrower returns with a dazzlingly original, mordantly witty novel about the secrets of an old-money family and their turn-of-the-century estate, Laurelfield.

“Rebecca Makkai is a writer to watch, as sneakily ambitious as she is unpretentious."--Richard Russo

In this intricate and deeply rewarding novel, Rebecca Makkai unfolds a narrative that moves backward in time from the present to three distinct moments in the past, leading the reader on a kind of literary scavenger hunt as we seek to unearth the truth about this family and their mysterious house, which seems to have intentions of its own.

Set in Chicago’s wealthy North Shore, near where Makkai herself grew up baby-sitting for the families of the elite, The Hundred-Year House is simultaneously a love story and a ghost story, as well as a meditation on the power of art to bring people together by breaking down boundaries and even the most well-guarded of family secrets.  Zee, a Marxist literary scholar, and her husband, Doug, are living in the carriage house of her family’s historic home while Doug finishes a biography of the poet Edwin Parfitt, who visited the estate in the 1920s when it was known as the Laurelfield Arts Colony.  But little does Zee know that what Doug is really doing each day, when she heads off to teach at the local college, is writing teen novels for a book packaging company for $2,000 a pop, falling in love with her step-brother’s wife, and above all, obsessing over the colony files Zee’s mother keeps locked in the attic, files he believes might just get his biography back on track. The secrets of the Devohr house could turn everything Doug and Zee know about her family on its head--that is, if they were ever to uncover them.

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Rebecca Makkai lives outside Chicago with her husband and two daughters. Her stories have aired on NPR’s Selected Shorts and This American Life, and have appeared in Harper’s, Tin House, and Ploughshares, where she blogs regularly. For more information, visit www.rebeccamakkai.com