The Seventh Mansion: A Novel

(Paperback)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

A sensitive and awkward loner who is deeply concerned with the environment, sixteen-year-old Xie finds community in his rural town with Jo and Leni, two queer girls his age, with whom he frees some captive mink from a local farm. When Xie is the only one caught, his small world gets smaller: Kicked out of high school, he becomes increasingly connected with nature, spending his time in the birch woods behind his house, attending extremist activist meetings, and serving as a custodian for what others ignore, abuse, and discard. Exploring the woods alone one night, Xie finds the relic of a Catholic saint hidden in a nearby church. Regal and dressed in ornate armor, it captivates him. After weeks of visits, Xie steals the skeleton, hides it in his attic bedroom, and develops a passionate relationship with the bones and spirit of the saint-the martyred Pancratius, or P.-who becomes Xie's companion. But when Xie's beloved woods are threatened by loggers, he and P. go to great lengths to protect them as Xie struggles to balance his conflicting-and increasingly extreme-ideals of purity, sacrifice, and responsibility. When the logging finally begins, blood is suddenly on the leaves. With the sinister imagination and twisted empathy that made her collections Heartbreaker and Rag cult classics, Maryse Meijer's debut novel is a moving, shocking, and profoundly original coming-of-age story that explores finding love and selfhood in the face of mass extinction and environmental destruction. Balancing the extreme idealism of teenagehood with drastic real world stakes, The Seventh Mansion is an unforgettable dive into finding solace during personal and global catastrophe.

Reviews

One of the most bizarre, brilliant books I've read this year . . . We often talk about brave, unique fiction, but explaining what it looks like is tough. The Seventh Mansion makes this task easier: unique, bold fiction looks like this. --Gabino Iglesias, Vol. 1 Brooklyn

This twisty and complicated debut novel from short story writer Meijer is the perfect climate-related fall fiction read . . . This book is slim but packed with complex characters and questions, including what it means to live on a changing planet. --Sarah Neilson, Shondaland

[A] strange, inventive first novel . . . Meijer spins a contemporary fable of lust, devotion, and transgression that will challenge readers to examine all the ways they move through the world. A sensitive, nuanced meditation on radical politics, queerness, and the responsibility of care. --Kirkus

Meijer's sharp, enjoyable debut novel is a bildungsroman that develops the themes of loneliness, sexuality, nature, and violence . . . This affecting investigation of ethics in a natural world struggling for survival will appeal to readers of character-driven eco-fiction. --Publishers Weekly

Reading The Seventh Mansion feels like receiving a divine transmission from a burning bush--I was beguiled by Maryse Meijer's brave and darting sentences and challenged by the questions raised. Can a life be led without doing harm Or should we forcefully dismantle the machines that act violently on our behalf --Catherine Lacey, author of Pew

"With astute empathy and tenderness, The Seventh Mansion brilliantly examines what it means to be human in a diminishing earthly world. Maryse Meijer's exquisite prose captures the beauty and ache of longing, and the desperation to save ourselves and the world around us. In this slim and stunning novel, Meijer beautifully answers the burning human question of what we really need to survive. This is truly the perfect love story." --Crissy Van Meter, author of Creatures

Maryse Meijer's The Seventh Mansion is one of the best books I've read in years. I feel like I've been waiting all my life for this book, like it was written specifically for me. It does what I treasure most in fiction: it takes the grotesque and makes it gorgeous. It humanizes all of us by humanizing one of us. Meijer makes the unholy holy, turns the grim dark into the blinding light. I don't recall reading a book simultaneously so horrifying and so romantic. This book made me dizzy with writer's envy and did that most wonderful of things: it made me want to try harder, be better. The Seventh Mansion is aflame with passion and I want to burn inside it forever. --Daniel Kraus, coauthor of The Shape of Water, and author of The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch

Author Bio

Maryse Meijer is the author of the story collections Heartbreaker, which was one of Electric Literature's 25 Best Short Story Collections of 2016, and Rag, which was a New York Times Book Review Editors' Pick and a finalist for the Chicago Review of Books Award for Fiction, as well as the novella Northwood. She lives in Chicago.