The Borrowed Place

Some houses are haunted. This one lends.

--- Widowed and buried in the debt her husband left behind, Ada Mercer has one season to save the last thing he gave her: a grand, half-ruined lodge at the bottom of a Tennessee hollow the old families call the Borrow. Fix it, fill it, book it solid by spring — or the bank takes everything. It's a gamble she can't afford and can't refuse.

The lodge doesn't rattle chains. It doesn't groan in the dark. It listens. And to each of them, very quietly, it offers the one thing they want most and would never say aloud.

For seven-year-old Nell, it's a friend in the empty house — a girl who knows the place, who lost her own daddy once, and who promises that Daddy can come home, if they want him to. For fifteen-year-old Eli, it's the truth: small, ugly facts that won't stop adding up to a single unbearable question about how his father really died. And for Ada, it's the thing she has been refusing to look at for eighteen months — the gray smear at the center of her grief that she buried so deep she has nearly convinced herself it was never there.

But the Borrow gives nothing away. It only lends. And the interest comes due in flesh, in time, in memory — and in people.

By the time Ada understands what the house is, and what filling its rooms will cost the strangers who come down that road, she will be forced to choose between a truth that destroys her and a lie her family can live happily inside. The cruelest part: her own salvation and the ruin of the next desperate family are the same act.

A descent in the tradition of Shirley Jackson and Stephen King, The Borrowed Place is a mountain-gothic about grief, debt, and the lengths a mother will go to keep from looking at what she's done — a novel that asks whether anyone can survive the truth, or only survive by refusing it.