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Housemates

Four housemates, looking for a fifth, the ad read. Queer preferred (we all are).

This is how Bernie, a film photographer, meets writer Leah, and from opposite sides of a thin bedroom wall in West Philadelphia the two become closer than they ever could have imagined. When Leah volunteers to accompany Bernie on a road trip to her former professor’s home in rural Pennsylvania to settle a complicated inheritance, what ensues is an unexpected road trip into the heart of America as the duo try to make sense of the times they are living in – falling in love with each other and rediscovering the power of making art along the way.

With humor, warmth, and beautifully observed characters, and told through the lens of two generations of queer creatives reflecting on questions of “how should a person be?”, Housemates is a glorious celebration of creativity, body liberation, chosen family–and of finding your place in an uncertain world.

Penguin Random House

2035

Select Praise for Housemates

“A perfect novel about making art, making a life, and how to do those things at the same time, with other people.”
—Hillary Leichter, The Millions  

“Ripe and undeniably rich . . . I fell deeply in love with this book, marveling at its lushness and its attention to detail, happy to follow wherever I was led. Emma Copley Eisenberg is a brilliant writer and Housemates is superb.”
—Kristen Arnett, New York Times bestselling author of Mostly Dead Things

“In contrast to the myth of the lone artistic genius who works in the absence of companionship and whose greatest achievements occur in isolation, Emma Copley Eisenberg explores the communal conditions that foster creativity, the interpersonal and social dynamics that contribute to innovation and insight, as well as those that hinder the production of art. Housemates is a complex
love story that traces the contours of an emerging relationship in its first glorious moments; and pays homage to the dynamics of a love that deepens over decades and the devastation induced when one partner dies.”
— The Athenaeum of Philadelphia Literary Prize award citation

“Gorgeous . . . Housemates is a novel as full as life itself, about art-making and love and friendship and making a way in the world, complicated, funny, questioning, moral. Bernie and Leah are still with me. I won’t ever forget them.”
—Elizabeth McCracken, author of The Hero of This Book

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