novels about home to read right now.

Humans haunt more houses than ghosts do. Men and women assign value to brick and mortar, link their identities to mortgages paid on time. On frigid winter nights, young mothers walk their fussy babies from room to room, learning where the rooms catch drafts and where the floorboards creak. In the warm damp of summer, fathers sit on porches, sometimes worried and often tired but comforted by the fact that a roof is up there providing shelter. Children smudge up walls with dirty handprints, find nooks to hide their particular treasure, or hide themselves if need be. We live and die in houses, dream of getting back to houses, take great care in considering who will inherit the houses when we’re gone.

- Angela Flournoy, The Turner House

I’m working from my mom and dad’s house this week and spending time in the four walls that served as the backdrop for so much of my growing up, it’s felt fitting to finally pull together a letter with some of past and present favorite books about home and houses and housing. House books, we can call them, even if no one else does.

The houses in these house books don’t all function as characters per se, but all of the books grapple, even in small or subtle ways, with how we make our homes and how they protect us, or change us, or haunt us. They’re books that one way or another give significance to the meanings that we layer onto walls that hold us, which is, of course, one of my very favorite things to think about.

The full list is below, plus a few books on the subject that my kids have also loved. In this season of reading on beaches and in inner tubes and late into too-warm nights, I’ll also share the book(s) I’ve got packed in my travel bag and hope you’ll all take to the comments to share yours, too.