A Novel
A Novel
Some places fade. Some places wait.
At three in the morning, a man opens a box his mother packed after clearing out his grandmother's apartment. Inside is a videotape marked Wedding, and the summer he was eleven begins to come back.
It is 3:03 a.m. and I am looking for my birth certificate.
I was lying in bed with the lamp still on, reading the same page of a paperback for maybe the ninth time. Somewhere around the fifth try the thought arrived. When was the last time I saw my birth certificate. Not as a question. As a fact I needed to reckon with.
Marion is in the Boundary Waters. She has been there five days. Twelve more to go.
The House Is Still There is a debut novel drawn from real life.
At three in the morning in Northfield, Minnesota, a man alone for the week opens a box his mother packed after cleaning out his grandmother's apartment. Inside is a videotape marked Wedding in a hand he knows. He watches it, and the summer he was eleven begins to come back: the drive east in a rented truck, the mansion his grandmother Florence rebuilt on the cliffs above Lake Huron, and the man who came around at dinnertime with a new truck and a fish he wanted the boy to see.
It is a book about a house that takes the energy out of everyone in it and gives nothing back, about a grandmother you cannot help loving and cannot help fearing, and about the things a boy sees at the edge of his vision and teaches himself not to look at. Told across two summers thirty years apart, it moves at the pace of memory toward what the boy carried north into the rest of his life.
Joshua Mills is a writer based in the Twin Cities. His fiction has been featured on the Let's Not Meet podcast, and his essays have appeared in the Minnesota Star Tribune. The House Is Still There is his first novel.
Some places fade. Some places wait.
The house is still there.
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