Thursday, September 25, 2025 at 4:30 PM
Skylight Books, Los Angeles
 CLICK HERE TO RSVP _**RSVP is recommended but not required. Entry and seating are first-come, first-served. RSVPs do not guarantee entry to a full event.**_ **The acclaimed author of _Red Clocks_ returns with a biting, lyrical novel about an intergenerational group home run by an ex-musician determined to make a place for those without one** On a bluff above a river rises The House, where elderly and disabled residents live alongside young people who help out in exchange for free rent. The community is led by a former punk singer who never wanted to be responsible for anyone yet now finds herself the caretaker of this precarious collection of lives. It’s not a family, exactly, but it’s got the complicated, sometimes painful, sometimes hilarious, dynamics of kinship. When two kids—Nola and her little cousin James—show up on The House’s back porch in need of refuge, the whole experiment is thrown into question. All are welcome here, or that was the idea. But the authorities are looking for these children, and The House’s finances are teetering on the edge. Zumas’s long-anticipated third novel wrestles with America’s crisis of care in a taut, aching, polyphonic tale that moves as fast as the crackling comebacks that fly between The House’s residents over breakfast. As the rules of the outside world start to press in on this safe haven, readers will find themselves asking, _what would the world look like if everyone had a place to belong?_ **Leni Zumas** was a finalist for the 2021 John Dos Passos Prize for Literature. Her bestselling novel _Red Clocks_ won the Oregon Book Award for Fiction and was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction and the Neukom Award for Speculative Fiction. The novel was a _New York Times Book Review_ Editors’ Choice and was named a Best Book of 2018 by _The Atlantic, the Washington Post, the Huffington Post_, and the New York Public Library. _Vulture_ called it one of the “100 Most Important Books of the 21st Century So Far.” Zumas’s fiction and nonfiction have appeared in _The New York Times, The Times Literary Supplement, Granta, Guernica, The Cut, Tin House,_ and elsewhere. She lives in Oregon and teaches in the creative writing program at Portland State University. **Meg Howrey** is the author of the novels _Blind Sight_, _The Cranes Dance_, _The Wanderers_, and most recently, _They’re Going to Love You_. Her writing has appeared in the _Los Angeles Review of Books,_ _The New York Times_, _Granta, Vogue, and Harvard Review_.