![]() Sounds seamless, but when Zee’s mother, who lives in the main building, invites another couple to share the carriage-house quarters with Zee and Doug, things begin to unravel, and a century’s-worth of secrets bubble up. Married scholars Zee and Doug move into the carriage house in 1999, she for proximity to her teaching job at a nearby university, he to do research for a monograph he’s preparing on Edwin Parfitt, a little-known poet who lived at the house in the 1920s. Secrets swim just below the surface, maybe with ghosts. Through its incarnations as an arts colony and empty-nester residence, one thing’s remained constant at Laurelfield: Nothing that happens (and no one who lives) within its walls is anything like it seems. ![]() “The Hundred-Year House” starts in 1999 and works its way backwards, through the history of a mansion (compound, really) called Laurelfield on Chicago’s North Shore to its groundbreaking in 1900. That novel, which established Makkai as a purveyor of unexpected stories and wry humor, bears little resemblance to this creepy tale, except, of course, that it’s full of unexpected storytelling and wry humor. What a clever, twisted story Rebecca Makkai has created in “The Hundred-Year House,” the compelling follow-up to her successful first foray into fiction, 2011’s “The Borrower.” ![]() Digital Replica Edition Home Page Close Menu ![]()
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