Draw Me the House

He crash-lands in a desert with two liters of water and no way to call for help. What finds him is a barefoot boy with no explanation for how he got there - and one simple request: Draw me the house. What the pilot draws, without meaning to, is a hangar. That is the wound at the center of Draw Me the House, an original novel written in the spirit of The Little Prince-reverent of its inheritance, but its own story entirely. Over the nights he waits for a rescue beacon to bring help, the boy, Asher, tells the stranded, wounded pilot where he's been: a string of small, strange worlds, each ruled by a single person who has mistaken one sliver of a life for the whole of it. A president who commands only what was already going to happen. A woman who has forgotten how to exist without being watched. A man who criticizes gardens he has never planted. A nurse who has never once been asked who takes care of her. Then Earth - louder, more crowded, harder to read than any small planet - where Asher follows a scent that reminds him of someone he thought he had left behind, meets a coyote who explains what it actually costs to know someone, and finds a well in the dark that tastes better for how far they had to walk to reach it. And the pilot, listening, begins to notice that his own life - twenty-two years on the same runway, at the same hour, calling it discipline - has a shape he recognizes from every planet Asher describes. Draw Me the House is a novel about the difference between the place you go to escape your life and the place where you actually live it - and about a boy who sits down beside a broken man in the sand and, without ever raising his voice, asks him to try to tell the two apart. For readers who loved the tenderness of *The Little Prince* and wanted to sit with its questions a little longer - in a book written for the adults that story always secretly belonged to, and waiting on the other side of childhood.