House of Refuge

With Shakespearean complexity and breath-taking pacing, Nate House's mystical and lyric House of Refuge transports us through more than three hundred years in an isolated Florida paradise, where we witness the carnage and destruction that come when humans abuse both nature and their fellow humans. But this very wise tale of tales also sings the hope song of survivors-bearers of ancestral stories about those driven to seek refuge, who may find it in human connection and in trying to live in harmony with the world around them. 

-Ned Bachus, author of City of Brotherly Love, winner of the Independent Publisher (IPPY) Gold Medal for Literary Fiction

Nate House's evocative House of Refuge chronicles three timelines on the same Florida land: a shipwrecked woman taken in by Ais Indians in 1694, a pioneer family escaping Michigan's cold in 1885, and an old man whose family has guarded this sacred land for three generations.

Eighty-three-year-old Abraham Corson Jr. has spent his life hearing ghostly cries of women, chains, and horses echoing across the water each night. Now he has eleven days to sell his property to a condo developer. But when a mysterious young woman appears beneath the ancient Live Oak, the boundaries between past and present begin to blur, and the haunting sounds grow more urgent-as if the land itself is awakening to fight back.

Through intimate journal entries and vivid natural imagery, House captures the true cost of American expansion. In an America where all wild spaces face the developer's bulldozer, House of Refuge asks whether some places are too sacred to surrender-and what forces might rise to defend them.