Robert Fitzgerald has a dream. Yearning for the stability of an ideal of family life that has always eluded him, he moves into town fresh from personal tragedy but determined to create a new kind of family unit. Life-affirming and unconventional, resolved to learn from his past mistakes, he buys a rambling old house and sets up an alternative living arrangement. He offers his housemates what he hopes is a source of support and connection free from the traumas and strains of people bound together by blood.

Into his home–the “House of Grins”–come people seeking refuge from the most profound conflicts of contemporary life: Dennis, a solitary young man on the mend from his second nervous breakdown, caught between healing solitude and desperate loneliness, in the grip of an unrequited (and lethal) love; Gene, a self-absorbed former minister now immersed in a New Age quest for the spiritual life, who celebrates freedom but flees from the demands of adult obligations; Martha, forced to choose between her career ambitions and love with a respectable and altogether dull suitor bent on making her a wife and stepmother; and Beth, an artist struggling with her own confusion and grim family history, who enters a too-intense relationship with Robert that threatens the outwardly-perfect family life she has so carefully crafted for herself and her husband.

By the end of the turbulent year they spend together, all of their relationships realign as Robert learns painful lessons about why his dream has eluded him.

This compelling, compassionate, and wryly comic new novel explores the urges that drive people out of–and back into–traditional family life.