A New York Times Best Book for March 2026 | A Belletrist book Club Pick | A Book Riot Most Anticipated Book of 2026 | A Chicago Review of Books Most Anticipated Book of 2026 | A Selection for The Booksellers' List
An eerie, spellbinding novel of grief, ghosts, apocalyptic rain, and slowly splintering reality, from an author who “writes with a pen as sharp and precise as a lancet.” —PEN/Hemingway Award judges’ citation
In the aftermath of her mother's death, Eleanor is unmoored. For years, her mother orchestrated every detail of her life—from meals, to laundry, to finances—as Eleanor focused on her career as an online therapist. Left to navigate the world on her own, Eleanor clings to her mother’s final directive: use her inheritance to buy a house.
Desperate to obey her mother one last time, Eleanor impulsively buys a model home in a valley-turned-construction site, a picturesque development steeped in a shadowy history. It feels like a fresh start, until the rain comes—an endless, torrential downpour. As water seeps in through the house’s cracks, the line between what is real and what is not begins to blur. Haunted by the stories of her clients, a stream of workmen and bureaucrats she can’t trust, and visions of ghosts from her past and present, Eleanor’s reality unravels, and she is forced to reckon with the secrets she’s buried and the choices she’s made.
KIM FU is the author of the acclaimed, prize-winning novels For Today I Am a Boy and The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore. Her most recent book, the story collection Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century, won the Washington State Book Award, the Pacific Northwest Book Award, and the Danuta Gleed Literary Award, and was a finalist for the Giller Prize, the Ignyte Awards, the Shirley Jackson Awards, and the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. Born in Calgary and raised in Vancouver, Fu now lives in Seattle, Washington.View all by Kim Fu
