A House Like An Accordion
Coming in May 2024 from Berkley/PRH
Keryth Miller is thirty-nine when she begins to disappear.
In the midst of middle-aged burnout, feeling invisible isn’t unexpected—between the growing distance between herself and her husband, Max, and the demands of two teenaged daughters, it would be normal to fade into the background.
Actual translucence, though—that’s new. It seems, at first, like it must be connected to the wide swaths of time she can’t account for. Her blips in memory are getting harder to explain as the family tries to settle into unexpected wealth, and a Malibu mansion, occasioned by the runaway success of the Millers’ artificial intelligence startup. Luxury rests uneasily on the shoulders of a woman who grew up without a steady home to call her own, but as her own transparency creeps toward those same shoulders, Keryth alights on an explanation.
If she’s disappearing, it’s because her Papa is drawing her. If he’s drawing her, he’s still alive. If he’s still alive, where has he been for twenty-five years? And why is he doing the one thing he always warned her not to? Never draw from life, Keryth. Every line exacts a cost.
Stopping what's happening now means facing what happened before - before her children, before her marriage, and before her past life came to an end on the muddy banks of an Arizona pond. It means retracing her own steps through the years, places, and people she thought she'd forgotten, finding the clues left behind by her very unusual family and the strange marks they left on the world.
Her path is guided by friends - old, new, lawyerly, and artificial - and brightened by one very opinionated (and inconveniently two-dimensional) Steller's jay, a bluebird of - well, not happiness, exactly. Keryth is still looking for that.
She can see its faint outlines, but if she's going to make it part of her world, she'll have to draw it for herself.
Books by Audrey Burges
The Minuscule Mansion of Myra Malone
From her attic in the Arizona mountains, thirty-four-year-old Myra Malone blogs about a dollhouse mansion that captivates thousands of readers worldwide. Myra’s stories have created legions of fans who breathlessly await every blog post, trade photographs of Mansion-modeled rooms, and swap theories about the enigmatic and reclusive author. Myra herself is tethered to the Mansion by mysteries she can’t understand—rooms that appear and disappear overnight, music that plays in its corridors.
Across the country, Alex Rakes, the scion of a custom furniture business, encounters two Mansion fans trying to recreate a room. The pair show him the Minuscule Mansion, and Alex is shocked to recognize a reflection of his own life mirrored back to him in minute scale. The room is his own bedroom, and the Mansion is his family’s home, handed down from the grandmother who disappeared mysteriously when Alex was a child. Searching for answers, Alex begins corresponding with Myra. Together, the two unwind the lonely paths of their twin worlds—big and small—and trace the stories that entwine them, setting the stage for a meeting rooted in loss, but defined by love.