Housebound

Elizabeth Gentry’s debut, Housebound, is a novel like no other: a disquieting and interior fairy-tale adventure through one family’s secrets and lies. Maggie, the eldest daughter, is preparing to leave the house in which she’s lived, worked, and been educated her whole life: a life led seemingly without contact with the outside world, save in the form of weekly trips to the library for the stories that are the only escape for Maggie and her eight brothers and sisters. Maggie’s seeming estrangement from the most familiar details of her life give the novel an almost Kafkaesque feel, as if Kafka had been born an Appalachian woman.

Elizabeth Gentry’s debut, Housebound, is a novel like no other: a disquieting and interior fairy-tale adventure through one family’s secrets and lies. Maggie, the eldest daughter, is preparing to leave the house in which she’s lived, worked, and been educated her whole life: a life led seemingly without contact with the outside world, save in the form of weekly trips to the library for the stories that are the only escape for Maggie and her eight brothers and sisters. Maggie’s seeming estrangement from the most familiar details of her life give the novel an almost Kafkaesque feel, as if Kafka had been born an Appalachian woman.

Elizabeth Gentry received the 2012 Madeleine P. Plonsker Emerging Writer’s Residency Prize for Housebound. Originally from Asheville, North Carolina, she lives in Knoxville, Tennessee, where she works as a writing specialist for the University of Tennessee College of Law and teaches in the university’s English department. She received a MFA in fiction writing from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.