House Gone Quiet: Stories

Longlisted for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence | Named a Best Book of 2023 by Library Journal and Debutiful

An eerie, irresistible debut story collection about the bonds and bounds of community and what it means to call a place home, “perfect for readers of Margaret Atwood and Carmen Maria Machado” (Booklist).

“A writer to watch if there ever was one.” —Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, author of Chain-Gang All-Stars

“Kelsey Norris’s carefully and beautifully crafted tales left me laughing, gasping, and completely enthralled.” —Deesha Philyaw, author of The Secret Lives of Church Ladies

A group of women contemplate violence after they’re sent into foreign territory to make husbands of the enemy. A support network of traumatized joggers meets to discuss the bodies they’ve found on their runs. And a town replaces its Confederate monument with a rotating cast of local residents. Slippery but muscular, sly but electric, this stunning debut collection moves from horror to magical realism to satire with total authority. In these stories, characters build and remake their sense of home, be it with one another or within themselves.

As in the very best collections, each of these stories is a world all its own, with a novel’s emotional heft and a poem’s laser focus on the most achingly resonant details of its characters’ lives. Captivating from start to finish, House Gone Quiet announces the arrival of a thrilling literary talent.