the HOUSE HE KEPT INSIDE: Novel of Memory, Marriage, and Refuge

Russell Keating has spent most of his life being needed. As a military officer, a husband, and a father, he learned to meet fear with preparation and uncertainty with action. Then an unexpected year in Iraq doing counter-IED work followed him home in ways he refused to recognize. Years later, during treatment for severe depression, Russell is taught to imagine a place where he can feel completely safe. He creates a stone cottage beside a snow-covered road. The fire is always burning. The rooms are warm. The wind stays outside. Nothing is required of him there. And no one else is ever allowed in. Not his children. Not even Marianne, the woman who begged him not to return to war and has spent nearly forty-five years beside the man who came back. As memory and marriage begin to press against the walls of the place Russell built to survive, he must confront a question he has avoided for years: when does refuge become isolation, and what does it mean to let another person enter the safest room inside you? >The safest place in his mind had room for everyone he loved, except that he had never let any of them in.