Celia Marsh

Celia Marsh has been coming to the summer house on the cape since she was a child. Her mother came before her. Her grandmother came before that. Three generations of women have spent their summers in the same house, accumulating the same rooms, the same light, the same particular quality of August on the coast. Now Celia is returning alone—the first summer since her mother died, the first time she'll be in the house without the generation before her. She expects grief. She expects memory. She doesn't expect the house to have been waiting for her specifically. *The Summer House* is literary fiction with supernatural elements about houses, inheritance, and the question of what buildings remember about the people who have lived in them. It follows Celia through a single summer—the first she'll spend alone in the house that has held three generations of her family—as she discovers that the house has been accumulating more than memories, and that it has something to tell her that her mother never said. The novel unfolds across four acts: The Arrival (the house as she remembers it, the weight of being there without her mother, the first signs that the house is different when she's alone); The Accumulation (the discovery of what the house has been holding—her grandmother's silences, her mother's secrets, the things that were never said but were absorbed by the rooms); The Message (what the house has been waiting to tell her, why it couldn't speak until she was alone, and the question of whether some inheritances should be passed on); and The Summer's End (what Celia does with what she's learned, whether she returns to the house next year, and the question of whether some buildings should be inherited or released). Celia is not a conventional protagonist. She approaches the summer house the way she approaches everything: by being present, by accumulating the weight of time, by learning what the rooms hold. She has spent every August of her life in this house. She knows its