Three Story House: A Novel [Large Print]

(Paperback)

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Description

Renovating an historic Memphis house together, three cousins discover that their spectacular failures in love, career, and family provide the foundation for their future happiness in this warm and poignant novel from the author of The Roots of the Olive Tree that is reminiscent of The Postmistress, The Secret Life of Bees, and Kristin Hannahs novels.

Nearing thirty and trying to avoid the inescapable fact that they have failed to live up to everyones expectations and their own aspirations, cousins and childhood best friends Lizzie, Elyse, and Isobel seek respite in an oddly-shaped, three-story house that sits on a bluff sixty feet above the Mississippi.

As they work to restore the almost condemned house, each woman faces uncomfortable truths about their own failings. Lizzie seeks answers to a long-held family secret about her father in her grandmothers jumble of mementos and the homes hidden spaces. Elyses obsession with an old flame leads her to a harrowing mistake that threatens to destroy her sisters wedding, and Isobels quest for celebrity tempts her to betray confidences in ways that would irreparably damage her two cousins.

Told in three parts from the perspective of each of the women, this sharply observed account of the restoration of a house built out of spite, but filled with memories of love is also an account of friendship and how relying on each others insights and strengths provides the women a way to get what they need instead of what they want.

Author Bio

Courtney Miller Santo learned to share the stories that come to her from her great-grandmother, who lives in Northern California. She teaches creative writing at the University of Memphis, where she received her MFA. She received a BA in journalism from Washington and Lee University, where she learned the limits of true stories, and although born and raised in Portland, Oregon, shes spent most of her adult life in the South, where she learned that not all stories are about kings and their palaces. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review, Irreantum, Sunstone, and Segullah.