Angie, seventeen, is a star pupil and swimmer with a seemingly assured future – when she has a psychotic breakdown. This haunting and affecting debut novel explores not just Angie’s inner turmoil but the collateral damage it inflicts on her family as they evolve and adapt to the crisis in their midst. Definitely a book worth reading and talking about.
';A teenager's psychotic break unhinges her family in this sure-footed first novel.' The New York Times Book Review A New York Times Editors' Choice Winner of the Kate Chopin Writing Award Winner of the Ken/NAMI Award One day, Angie Voorsterdiligent student, all-star swimmer, and ivy-league bound high school seniordives to the bottom of a pool and stays there. In that moment, everything the Voorster family believes they know about each other changes. Katharine Noel's extraordinary debut illuminates the fault lines in one family's relationships, as well as the complex emotional ties that bind them together. With grace and precision rarely seen in a first novel, Noel guides her reader through a world where love is imperfect, and where longing for an imagined ideal can both destroy one family's happiness and offer them redemption. Halfway House introduces a powerful, eloquent new literary voice. ';An eloquent literary performance... [A] memorable first novel with a uniquely powerful grace.' The Boston Globe
‘In Katharine Noel’s stunning debut novel, family life is revealed - laid open - in all its love and warmth and, yes, its darkness, too. Mother and daughter, husband and wife, sister and brother, father and son: each character lives on the page, and together they teach us the best lessons of fiction: how we live, and how we live through crisis. I was enthralled.’ Ann Packer, author of The Dive from Clausen’s Pier
'A beautiful debut novel' Daily Mail
'a sure-footed debut' The New York Times
Author
About Katharine Noel
Katharine Noel is a Jones Lecturer at Stanford University, where she formerly held a Stegner Fellowship. Her writing has won grants from the Henfield-Transatlantic, Barbara Deming, and Rona Jaffe foundations, and was included in Best New American Voices 2003. She currently lives in San Francisco, where she is at work on her second novel.
